Present-Day Growth of Black Holes and Bulges: the SDSS Perspective

Abstract

We investigate the accretion-driven growth of supermassive black holes in the low-redshift Universe using 23,000 ``Type 2'' AGN and the complete sample of 123,000 galaxies in the SDSS from which they were drawn. We use the stellar velocity dispersions of the early type galaxies and AGN hosts to estimate their black hole masses and we use the AGN [OIII]5007 emission line luminosities to estimate black hole accretion rates. We find that most present-day accretion occurs onto black holes with masses < 10E8 Msun that reside in moderately massive galaxies (M ~ 10E10 to 10E11.5 Msun) with high stellar densities (~10E8.5 to 10E9.5 Msun/kpc^2) and young stellar populations. The volume-averaged accretion rates of low mass black holes (<10E7.5 Msun) imply that this population is growing on a timescale that is comparable to the age of the Universe. Around half this growth takes place in AGN that are radiating within a factor of five of the Eddington luminosity. Such systems are rare, making up only 0.2% of the low mass black hole population at the present day. The rest of the growth occurs in lower luminosity AGN. The growth timescale is more than two orders of magnitude longer for the population of the most massive black holes in our sample. The volume averaged ratio of star formation to black hole accretion in bulge-dominated galaxies is ~1000, in remarkable agreement with the observed ratio of stellar mass to black hole mass in nearby galaxy bulges. We conclude: a) that bulge formation and black hole formation are tightly coupled, even in present-day galaxies; and b) that the evolution of the AGN luminosity function documented in recent optical and x-ray surveys is driven by a decrease in the characteristic mass scale of accreting black holes.