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Faculty and Research Publications

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Supermassive black holes

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Full-Text Articles in Physics

The Sub-Eddington Boundary For The Quasar Mass–Luminosity Plane: A Theoretical Perspective, David Garofalo, Damian J. Christian, Andrew M. Jones Jun 2019

The Sub-Eddington Boundary For The Quasar Mass–Luminosity Plane: A Theoretical Perspective, David Garofalo, Damian J. Christian, Andrew M. Jones

Faculty and Research Publications

By exploring more than sixty thousand quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5, Steinhardt & Elvis discovered a sub-Eddington boundary and a redshift-dependent drop-off at higher black hole mass, possible clues to the growth history of massive black holes. Our contribution to this special issue of Universe amounts to an application of a model for black hole accretion and jet formation to these observations. For illustrativepurposes,we include~100,000 data points from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 where the sub-Eddington boundary is also visible andpropose a theoretical picture that explains these features. By appealing to thin …


Fr0 Radio Galaxies And Their Place In The Radio Morphology Classification, David Garofalo, Chandra B. Singh Feb 2019

Fr0 Radio Galaxies And Their Place In The Radio Morphology Classification, David Garofalo, Chandra B. Singh

Faculty and Research Publications

So-called FR0 radio galaxies have recently emerged as a family of active galaxies with all the same properties as FRI radio galaxies except for their ratio of core to total emission, which is about 30 times higher than that of FRI sources. We show how their properties fit within the gap paradigm as low, prograde, spinning black holes whose progenitors are powerful FRII quasars that transitioned rapidly from the cold mode into advection-dominated accretion over a few million years. The prediction is that if sufficient fuel exists, FR0 radio galaxies will evolve into full-fledged FRI radio galaxies and the observational …


Possible Evolution Of Supermassive Black Holes From Fri Quasars, Matthew I. Kim, Damian J. Christian, David Garofalo, Jaclyn D'Avanzo May 2016

Possible Evolution Of Supermassive Black Holes From Fri Quasars, Matthew I. Kim, Damian J. Christian, David Garofalo, Jaclyn D'Avanzo

Faculty and Research Publications

We explore the question of the rapid buildup of black hole mass in the early universe employing a growing black hole mass-based determination of both jet and disc powers predicted in recent theoretical work on black hole accretion and jet formation. Despite simplified, even artificial assumptions about accretion and mergers, we identify an interesting low probability channel for the growth of one billion solar mass black holes within hundreds of millions of years of the big bang without appealing to super Eddington accretion. This result is made more compelling by the recognition of a connection between this channel and an …


Reconciling Ag-Star Formation, The Soltan Argument, And Meier's Paradox, David Garofalo, Matthew I. Kim, Damian J. Christian, Emily Hollingworth Jan 2016

Reconciling Ag-Star Formation, The Soltan Argument, And Meier's Paradox, David Garofalo, Matthew I. Kim, Damian J. Christian, Emily Hollingworth

Faculty and Research Publications

We provide a theoretical context for understanding the recent work of Kalfountzou et al. showing that star formation is enhanced at lower optical luminosity in radio-loud quasars. Our proposal for coupling the assumption of collimated FRII quasar-jet-induced star formation with lower accretion optical luminosity also explains the observed jet power peak in active galaxies at higher redshift compared to the peak in accretion power, doing so in a way that predicts the existence of a family of radio-quiet active galactic nuclei associated with rapidly spinning supermassive black holes at low redshift, as mounting observations suggest. The relevance of this work …