Mass without radiation: heavily obscured AGN, the X-ray Background and the Black Hole Mass Density

Abstract

A recent revision of black hole scaling relations (Kormendy & Ho 2013), indicates that the local mass density in black holes should be increased by up to a factor of five with respect to previously determined values. The local black hole mass density is connected to the mean radiative efficiency of accretion through the time integral of the AGN volume density and a significant increase of the local black holes mass density would have interesting consequences on AGN accretion properties and demography. One possibility to explain a large black hole mass density is that most of the Black Hole growth is via radiatively inefficient channels such as super Eddington accretion, however, given the intrinsic degeneracies in the Soltan argument, this solution is not unique. Here we show how it is possible to accommodate a larger fraction of heavily buried, Compton thick AGN, without violating the limit imposed by the hard X-ray and mid-infrared backgrounds spectral energy density.

A&A Letters, in press; reference added

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• Compton Thick AGN in the 70 Month Swift-BAT All-Sky Hard X-ray Survey: a Bayesian approach
• The Active Fraction of Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies
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• $NuSTAR$ Observations of Four Nearby X-ray Faint AGN: Low Luminosity or Heavy Obscuration?
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• Heavily Obscured AGN detection: a Radio vs X-ray challenge
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• Gravitational Waves from Direct Collapse Black Holes Formation
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