The growth of supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies

Research report (imported) 2005 - Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

Authors
Kauffmann, Guinevere und von der Linden, Anja
Departments
Kosmologie (Prof. Dr. Simon White)
MPI für Astrophysik, Garching
Summary
Abstract Using a catalog of more than 80000 galaxies with active nuclei, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a team from the MPI for Astrophysics and from Johns Hopkins University has studied the connection between the growth of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and of their host galaxies. Most of the black hole growth today is occurring in relatively low-mass black holes (comparable to the one in the center of our Milky Way), whereas the main epoch of growth of the most massive black holes dates back much earlier. They also find that those galaxies in which the central black hole is currently growing have recently formed stars -- a fact that highlights how the mass of the black hole is tightly linked with the stellar mass of its host.

For the full text, see the German version.

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