A CORRELATION BETWEEN STAR FORMATION RATE AND AVERAGE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION IN STAR-FORMING GALAXIES

Journal Article · Sat Aug 10 04:00:00 EDT 2013 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/773/1/3· OSTI ID:22140312

Chen, Chien-Ting J.; Hickox, Ryan C. ^[1]; Alberts, Stacey; Pope, Alexandra ^[2]; Brodwin, Mark ^[3]; Jones, Christine; Forman, William R.; Goulding, Andrew D. ^[4]; Murray, Stephen S. ^[5]; Alexander, David M.; Mullaney, James R. ^[6]; Assef, Roberto J.; Gorjian, Varoujan ^[7]; Brown, Michael J. I. ^[8]; Dey, Arjun; Jannuzi, Buell T. ^[9]

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1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, 6127 Wilder Laboratory, Hanover, NH 03755 (United States)
2. Department of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 (United States)
3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Missouri, 5110 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64110 (United States)
4. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
5. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
6. Department of Physics, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE (United Kingdom)
7. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
8. School of Physics, Monash University, Clayton 3800, Victoria (Australia)
9. National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, AZ 85726 (United States)

We present a measurement of the average supermassive black hole accretion rate (BHAR) as a function of the star formation rate (SFR) for galaxies in the redshift range 0.25 < z < 0.8. We study a sample of 1767 far-IR-selected star-forming galaxies in the 9 deg{sup 2} Booetes multi-wavelength survey field. The SFR is estimated using 250 {mu}m observations from the Herschel Space Observatory, for which the contribution from the active galactic nucleus (AGN) is minimal. In this sample, 121 AGNs are directly identified using X-ray or mid-IR selection criteria. We combined these detected AGNs and an X-ray stacking analysis for undetected sources to study the average BHAR for all of the star-forming galaxies in our sample. We find an almost linear relation between the average BHAR (in M{sub Sun} yr{sup -1}) and the SFR (in M{sub Sun} yr{sup -1}) for galaxies across a wide SFR range 0.85 < log SFR < 2.56: log BHAR = (- 3.72 {+-} 0.52) + (1.05 {+-} 0.33)log SFR. This global correlation between SFR and average BHAR is consistent with a simple picture in which SFR and AGN activity are tightly linked over galaxy evolution timescales.

• OSTI ID: 22140312
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 773; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
BLACK HOLES
CORRELATIONS
NUCLEI
RED SHIFT
SPACE
STAR EVOLUTION
STARS
WAVELENGTHS
X RADIATION
X-RAY GALAXIES