Far-infrared nebular spectral features from growing massive black holes

Abstract

Supermassive black holes (BHs) and their host galaxies are interlinked by virtue of feedbacks and are thought to be co-eval across the Hubble time. This relation is highlighted by an approximate proportionality between the BH mass $M_\bullet$ and the mass of a stellar bulge $M_\ast$ of the host galaxy. However, a large spread of the ratio $M_\bullet/M_\ast$ and a considerable excess of BH mass at redshifts $z\sim8$, indicate that the coevolution of central massive BHs and stellar populations in host galaxies may have experienced variations in its intensity. These issues require a robust determination of the relevant masses (BH, stars and gas), which is difficult in the case of distant high-redshift galaxies that are unresolved. In this paper, we seek to identify spectral diagnostics that may tell us about the relative masses of the BH, the gas mass and stellar mass. We consider general features of SEDs of galaxies that harbour growing massive BHs, forming stars and interstellar/circumgalactic gas. We focus on observational manifestations of possible predominances or intermittent variations in evolutionary episodes of growing massive BHs and forming stellar populations. We consider simplified scenarios for star formation and massive BHs growth, and simple models for chemical composition of gas, for dust free gas as well as for gas with dust mass fraction of $1/3$ of the metal content. We argue that wideband multi-frequency observations (X-ray to submillimeter) of the composite emission spectra of growing BH, stellar population and nebular emission of interstellar gas are sufficient to infer their masses.