CaltechAUTHORS
Published June 21, 2014 | Version Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Black hole accretion preferentially occurs in gas-rich galaxies

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Bologna
  • 2. ROR icon University of Cambridge
  • 3. ROR icon Astronomical Observatory of Rome
  • 4. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
  • 5. ROR icon Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory
  • 6. ROR icon Virginia Tech
  • 7. ROR icon University of Padua
  • 8. ROR icon Trieste Astronomical Observatory
  • 9. ROR icon University of British Columbia
  • 10. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We have investigated the gas content of a sample of several hundred AGN host galaxies at z < 1 and compared it with a sample of inactive galaxies, matched in bins of stellar mass and redshift. Gas masses have been inferred from the dust masses, obtained by stacked Herschel far-IR and sub-mm data in the GOODS and COSMOS fields, under reasonable assumptions and metallicity scaling relations for the dust-to-gas ratio. We find that AGNs are on average hosted in galaxies much more gas rich than inactive galaxies. In the vast majority of stellar mass bins, the average gas content of AGN hosts is higher than that in inactive galaxies. The difference is up to a factor of 10 higher in low-stellar-mass galaxies, with a significance of 6.5σ. In almost half of the AGN sample, the gas content is three times higher than that in the control sample of inactive galaxies. Our result strongly suggests that the probability of having an AGN activated is simply driven by the amount of gas in the host galaxy; this can be explained in simple terms of statistical probability of having a gas cloud falling into the gravitational potential of the black hole. The increased probability of an AGN being hosted by a star-forming galaxy, identified by previous works, may be a consequence of the relationship between gas content and AGN activity, found in this paper, combined with the Schmidt–Kennicutt law for star formation.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 March 31; Received 2014 March 25; In original form 2014 January 23. Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA. We acknowledge support from the Italian Space Agency under the ASI-INAF contract I/009/10/0 and from INAF under the contract PRIN-INAF-2012. FV thanks B. Luo for kindly providing Chandra IDs of MUSIC counterparts in GOODS-S and I. Delvecchio for useful discussion on SED-fitting procedure. This paper uses data from Herschel's photometers, PACS and SPIRE. PACS has been developed by a consortium of institutes led by MPE (Germany) and including UVIE (Austria); KU Leuven, CSL, IMEC (Belgium); CEA, LAM (France); MPIA (Germany); INAF-IFSI/OAA/OAP/OAT, LENS, SISSA (Italy); IAC (Spain). This development has been supported by the funding agencies BMVIT (Austria), ESA-PRODEX (Belgium), CEA/CNES (France), DLR (Germany), ASI/INAF (Italy) and CICYT/MCYT (Spain). SPIRE has been developed by a consortium of institutes led by Cardiff University (UK) and including Univ. Lethbridge (Canada); NAOC (China); CEA, LAM (France); IFSI, Univ. Padua (Italy); IAC (Spain); Stockholm Observatory (Sweden); Imperial College London, RAL, UCL-MSSL, UKATC, Univ. Sussex (UK); and Caltech, JPL, NHSC, Univ. Colorado (USA). This development has also been supported by national funding agencies: CSA (Canada); NAOC (China); CEA, CNES, CNRS (France); ASI (Italy);MCINN (Spain); SNSB (Sweden); STFC, UKSA (UK); and NASA (USA).

Attached Files

Published - MNRAS-2014-Vito-1059-65.pdf

Submitted - 1403.7966v1.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
46548
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20140627-090833691

Related works

Describes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.7966 (URL)

Funding

Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)
I/009/10/0
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)
PRIN-INAF-2012
Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC)
Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MCINN)
Swedish National Space Board (SNSB)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA)
NASA
Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie (BMVIT)
ESA-PRODEX (Belgium)
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)
Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT)
Ministerio de Ciencia Y Tecnologia (MCYT)

Dates

Created
2014-06-27
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-10
Created from EPrint's last_modified field