Bibcode
Mechtley, M.; Jahnke, K.; Windhorst, R. A.; Andrae, R.; Cisternas, M.; Cohen, S. H.; Hewlett, T.; Koekemoer, A. M.; Schramm, M.; Schulze, A.; Silverman, J. D.; Villforth, C.; van der Wel, A.; Wisotzki, L.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 830, Issue 2, article id. 156, 29 pp. (2016).
Advertised on:
10
2016
Journal
Citations
98
Refereed citations
93
Description
The most frequently proposed model for the origin of quasars holds that
the high accretion rates seen in luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN)
are primarily triggered during major mergers between gas-rich galaxies.
While plausible for decades, this model has only begun to be tested with
statistical rigor in the past few years. Here, we report on a Hubble
Space Telescope study to test this hypothesis for z = 2 quasars with
high supermassive black hole masses
({M}{BH}={10}9{--}{10}10 {M}ȯ
), which dominate cosmic black hole growth at this redshift. We
compare Wide Field Camera 3 F160W (rest-frame V-band) imaging of 19
point source-subtracted quasar hosts to a matched sample of 84 inactive
galaxies, testing whether the quasar hosts have greater evidence for
strong gravitational interactions. Using an expert ranking procedure, we
find that the quasar hosts are uniformly distributed within the merger
sequence of inactive galaxies, with no preference for quasars in
high-distortion hosts. Using a merger/non-merger cutoff approach, we
recover distortion fractions of {f}{{m},{qso}}=0.39+/- 0.11
for quasar hosts and {f}{{m},{gal}}=0.30+/- 0.05 for inactive
galaxies (distribution modes, 68% confidence intervals), with both
measurements subjected to the same observational conditions and
limitations. The slight enhancement in distorted fraction for quasar
hosts over inactive galaxies is not significant, with a probability that
the quasar fraction is higher P({f}{{m},{qso}}\gt
{f}{{m},{gal}})=0.78 (0.78σ ), in line with results for
lower mass and lower z AGN. We find no evidence that major mergers are
the primary triggering mechanism for the massive quasars that dominate
accretion at the peak of cosmic quasar activity.