When: Friday, May 31, 2024, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PMWhere: GO Jones 610
Probing Supermassive Black Holes scaling relations and evolution across cosmic epochs
The correlations between Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) mass and host galaxy properties can reveal the processes shaping the co-evolution of SMBHs and galaxies, from mergers to Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) feedback. However,
a clear knowledge of the exact shape and evolution of these relations is still missing, along with the information on which of the galaxy properties is most fundamentally related to SMBH mass.
In this talk, I will present the latest results on the SMBH scaling relations, their residuals, and their time evolution. I will first show that stellar velocity dispersion is, according to the latest available data, the key galactic property linked to SMBH mass Mbh in the local Universe. The correlation with galactic total stellar mass Mgal at fixed stellar velocity dispersion sigma disappears, whilst the one with stellar velocity dispersion at fixed stellar mass is steep and strong, implying that interpreting the co-evolution between SMBHs and their host galaxies uniquely on the Mbh-Mgal plane may lead to inaccurate conclusions.
These behaviours in the residuals of the SMBH-galaxy scaling relations are NOT reproduced by several of the current state-of-the-art models. In many galaxy evolution models, in fact, the apparently steep Mbh-sigma relation, is mostly a conspiracy induced by the underlying combination between the Mbh-Mgal and Mgal-sigma relation, which can be unveiled when analysing the residuals.
I will also show that current high-z data in terms of (integrated) X-ray luminosities and star formation histories, all suggest a weak evolution of the SMBH-galaxy scaling relations up to at least z~2-3, providing a robust benchmark for interpreting the new high-z data from JWST.
I will conclude by showing preliminary results on a new approach to describe the statistical evolution of SMBHs from z~6 to the local Universe in a semi-empirical fashion capable to robustly predicting SMBH mass functions, duty cycles, scaling relations, a powerful tool to unveil systematic inconsistencies among different data sets at high and low redshifts.