Department
Physics
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2019
Abstract
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 disk theory and both the lower accretion efficiency and the time evolution of jetted quasars compared to non-jetted quasars in our “gap paradigm”, we explain two features of the sub-Eddington boundary. First, we show that a drop-off on the quasar mass-luminosity plane for larger black hole mass occurs at allredshifts. But the fraction of jetted quasars is directly related to the merger function in thisparadigm, which means the jetted quasar fraction drops with decrease in redshift, which allows us to explain a second feature of the sub-Eddington boundary, namely a redshift dependence of the slope of the quasar mass-luminosity boundary at high black hole mass stemming from a change in radiative efficiency with time. We are able to reproduce the mass dependence of, as well as the oscillating behavior in, the slope of the sub-Eddington boundary as a function of time. The basic physical idea involves retrograde accretion occurring only for a subset of the more massive black holes,which implies that most spinning black holes in our model are prograde accretors.In short, this paper amounts to a qualitative overview of how a sub-Eddington boundary naturally emerges in the gap paradigm.
Journal Title
Universe
Journal ISSN
2218-1997
Volume
5
Issue
6
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.3390/universe5060145
Comments
Published by 'Universe' at 10.3390/universe5060145.