Supermassive Black Hole Growth and Merger Rates from Cosmological N-body Simulations

Abstract

Understanding how seed black holes grow into intermediate and supermassive black holes (IMBHs and SMBHs, respectively) has important implications for the duty-cycle of active galactic nuclei (AGN), galaxy evolution, and gravitational wave astronomy. Most studies of the cosmological growth and merger history of black holes have used semianalytic models and have concentrated on SMBH growth in luminous galaxies. Using high resolution cosmological N-body simulations, we track the assembly of black holes over a large range of final masses -- from seed black holes to SMBHs -- over widely varying dynamical histories. We used the dynamics of dark matter halos to track the evolution of seed black holes in three different gas accretion scenarios. We have found that growth of Sagittarius A* - size SMBH reaches its maximum mass M_{SMBH}~10^6Msun at z~6 through early gaseous accretion episodes, after which it stays at near constant mass. At the same redshift, the duty-cycle of the host AGN ends, hence redshift z=6 marks the transition from an AGN to a starburst galaxy which eventually becomes the Milky Way. By tracking black hole growth as a function of time and mass, we estimate that the IMBH merger rate reaches a maximum of R_{max}=55 yr^-1 at z=11. From IMBH merger rates we calculate N_{ULX}=7 per Milky Way type galaxy per redshift in redshift range 2<z<6.

12 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Probing the theory of gravity with gravitational lensing of gravitational waves and galaxy surveys
• Gravitational Wave Recoil and the Retention of Intermediate Mass Black Holes
• Electromagnetic Counterparts to Massive Black Hole Mergers
• Pre-Merger Localization of Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens With LISA: Triggered Search for an Electromagnetic Counterpart
• Multi-messenger tests of gravity with weakly lensed gravitational waves
• Localizing coalescing massive black hole binaries with gravitational waves
• Observing the inspiral of coalescing massive black hole binaries with LISA in the era of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics
• SuperRad: Modeling the black hole superradiance gravitational waveform
• Characterisation of lensing selection effects for LISA massive black hole binary mergers
• Characterizing Spinning Black Hole Binaries in Eccentric Orbits with LISA
• Effects of Inclination on Measuring Velocity Dispersion and Implications for Black Holes
• The Fundamental Planes of Black Hole Activity for Radio-Loud and Radio-Quiet Quasars
• Gravitational Wave Signal from Assembling the Lightest Supermassive Black Holes
• Cosmological Physics with Black Holes (and Possibly White Dwarfs)
• High-energy neutrino emission subsequent to gravitational wave radiation from supermassive black hole mergers
• Examining subgrid models of supermassive black holes in cosmological simulation
• The role of gravitational recoil in the assembly of massive black hole seeds
• Environments of dwarf galaxies with optical AGN characteristics
• Constraining the host galaxy halos of massive black holes from LISA event rates
• Detectability of dark matter density distribution via gravitational waves from binary black holes in the Galactic center
• Radio continuum observations of the candidate supermassive black hole in the dwarf elliptical VCC128
• The effect of redshift degeneracy and the damping effect of viscous medium on the information extracted from gravitational wave signals