DETECTION OF QUASAR FEEDBACK FROM THE THERMAL SUNYAEV–ZEL’DOVICH EFFECT INPLANCK

Abstract

Poorly understood feedback processes associated with highly-luminous black hole accretion in quasars may dramatically affect the properties of their host galaxies. We search for the effect of quasar feedback on surrounding gas using Planck maps of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (tSZ). By stacking tSZ Compton-y maps centered on the locations of 26,686 spectroscopic quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we detect a strong but unresolved tSZ Compton-y signal at >5σ significance that likely originates from a combination of virialized halo atmosphere gas and quasar feedback effects. We show that the feedback contribution to our detected quasar tSZ signal is likely to dominate over virialized halo gas by isolating the feedback tSZ component for high-and low-redshift quasars. We find that this quasar tSZ signal also scales with black hole mass and bolometric luminosity, all consistent with general expectations of quasar feedback. We estimate the mean angularly-integrated Compton-y of quasars at z 1.5 to be 3.5×10 −6 Mpc 2 , corresponding to mean total thermal energies in feedback and virialized halo gas of 1.1 (±0.2) × 10 62 erg, and discuss the implications for quasar feedback. If confirmed, the large total thermal feedback energetics we estimate of 5% (±1% statistical uncertainty) of the black hole mass will have important implications for the effects of quasar feedback on the host galaxy, as well as the surrounding intergalactic medium.

Constraining Agn Feedback in Massive Ellipticals With South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev–zel’dovich Effect

“…However, we find a much smaller tSZ signal than both the high and low redshift results of Ruan et al (2015), although it is suspected that their values are significantly overestimated (e.g., Cen & Safarzadeh 2015b). We also find a slightly smaller tSZ signal than the simulated results of Cen & Safarzadeh (2015b), and our results favor their CS model, which associates quasars with lower mass dark matter halos.…”

“…Plugging these into the theoretical AGN feedback energy equation and solving for  k , we get feedback efficiencies of -+ 1.5 1.6 1.3 % for low-z and -+ 1.3 3.1 3.5 % for high-z. These values are very uncertain, though they do hint at feedback efficiencies slightly lower than the suggested 5% (i.e., Scannapieco et al 2005;Ruan et al 2015).…”

“…We can calculate the total excess thermal energy associated with a source by integrating Equation (2) over a region of sky around the source as (e.g., Scannapieco et al 2008;Ruan et al 2015 where q is a two-dimensional vector in the plane of the sky in units of radians, l ang is the angular diameter distance to the source, V is the volume of interest around the source, and we have restricted our attention to hot gas with  T T .…”

“…Alternatively, we can also characterize the total tSZ signal for our coadds with the angularly integrated Compton-y parameter, Y (e.g., Ruan et al 2015). While we cannot directly compare peak Compton-y values with past measurements, as these are beam-dependent quantities, we can compare the Figure 12.…”

“…We can compare our results to Cen & Safarzadeh (2015b) Note.LRGs-luminous red galaxies; LBGs-locally brightest galaxies. Masses refer to halo masses, except for those of Greco et al (2014) and Ruan et al (2015) LBGs which refer to stellar masses (). We select Hand et al (2011) and Greco et al (2014) values that have the most similar masses to our galaxies.…”