Jonathan Trump (UC Santa Cruz)

Not All AGNs are Created Equal: How Galaxies Feed and Obscure Their
SMBHs

I will discuss unified models for active galaxies, using the COSMOS and CANDELS deep multiwavelength surveys to show how galaxy evolution is tied to fueling, obscuration, and feedback from their supermassive black holes. The classical unified model for active galaxies suggests that all AGN are physically the same, but appear different due only to obscuration in the line of sight. I will instead show that accretion rate is an important axis in any AGN unified model. At low accretion rates, the material around an AGN changes from a thin disk to a radiatively inefficient accretion flow. This is particularly important for galaxy evolution because inefficient accretion leads to weaker ionizing radiation and a change in the dominant feedback mode from radiation driven winds to radio jets. I will also show how the obscuration and accretion rate axes of AGN unification are connected to galaxies in different stages of evolution. Rapidly accreting AGNs tend to lie in disturbed galaxies with merger signatures (when obscured) or massive, post-merger spheroids (when unobscured). Meanwhile weakly accreting AGNs tend to lie in undisturbed, disk-dominated galaxies. In contrast to popular models of supermassive black hole growth and galaxy evolution, observations suggest that disk-fueled weakly accreting AGNs, and not merger-fed QSOs, dominate the X-ray lumninosity function at z<2.