Overview of e-reserve

Major Mergers Are Not the Dominant Trigger for High-accretion AGNs at z ∼ 2

“…Recent studies show no correlation between increased AGN activity and central bars, which could also lead to disk-instabilities and subsequently to a gas inflow to the galaxy center (Cheung et al 2015;Cisternas et al 2015;Goulding et al 2017). This leaves minor mergers and bar-independent secular processes as the remaining viable options for the bulk of black hole growth.…”

“…However, over the last years the relevance of major interactions and the connection to the growth of BHs has been extensively tested in a systematic way, leading to the contrary finding in which the merging of two gas-rich galaxies is playing a sub-dominant part for the occurrence of an AGN. Neither for the bulk of X-ray detected and optically observed AGNs across cosmic time (Gabor et al 2009;Georgakakis et al 2009;Cisternas et al 2011) nor for AGNs at low or intermediate luminosities (L X ≤ 10 43 erg s −1 ; Grogin et al 2005;Allevato et al 2011;Schawinski et al 2011;Kocevski et al 2012;Böhm et al 2013;Cheung et al 2015;Cisternas et al 2015;Rosario et al 2015;Goulding et al 2017) an observational connection in form of a triggering and fueling by major mergers could be found. Studies examining AGNs with high luminosities (L X ≥ 10 43 erg s −1 ; Karouzos et al 2014;Villforth et al 2014Villforth et al , 2017Hewlett et al 2017), BHs possessing the highest masses (Mechtley et al 2016) or heavily obscured AGNs ) came to the same conclusion.…”