Thursday, October 20, 2011

1110.4118 (Chris J. Willott)

No evidence of obscured, accreting black holes in most z=6 star-forming galaxies    [PDF]

Chris J. Willott
It has been claimed that there is a large population of obscured, accreting black holes at high-redshift and that the integrated black hole density at z=6 as inferred from X-ray observations is ~100 times greater than inferred from optical quasars. I have performed a stacking analysis of very deep Chandra X-ray data at the positions of photometrically-selected z=6 galaxy candidates. It is found that there is no evidence for a stacked X-ray signal in either the soft (0.5-2 keV) or hard (2-8 keV) X-ray bands. Previous work which reported a significant signal is affected by an incorrect method of background subtraction which underestimates the true background within the target aperture. The puzzle remains of why the z=6 black hole mass function has such a flat slope and a low normalization compared to the stellar mass function.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.4118

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