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Register a new userA high space density of L* Active Galactic Nuclei at z~4 in the COSMOS field
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Added by
Konstantina Boutsia
Publication date
2018
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
K. Boutsia
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Identifying the source population of ionizing radiation, responsible for the reionization of the universe, is currently a hotly debated subject with conflicting results. Studies of faint, high-redshift star-forming galaxies, in most cases, fail to detect enough escaping ionizing radiation to sustain the process. Recently, the capacity of bright quasi-stellar objects to ionize their surrounding medium has been confirmed also for faint active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which were found to display an escaping fraction of ~74% at z~4. Such levels of escaping radiation could sustain the required UV background, given the number density of faint AGNs is adequate. Thus, it is mandatory to accurately measure the luminosity function of faint AGNs (L~L*) in the same redshift range. For this reason we have conducted a spectroscopic survey, using the wide field spectrograph IMACS at the 6.5m Baade Telescope, to determine the nature of our sample of faint AGN candidates in the COSMOS field. This sample was assembled using photometric redshifts, color, and X-ray information. We ended up with 16 spectroscopically confirmed AGNs at 3.6<z<4.2 down to a magnitude of i$_{AB}$=23.0 for an area of 1.73 deg$^{2}$. This leads to an AGN space density of ~1.6$times10^{-6} Mpc^{-3}$ (corrected) at z~4 for an absolute magnitude of M$_{1450}$=-23.5. This is higher than previous measurements and seems to indicate that AGNs could make a substantial contribution to the ionizing background at z~4. Assuming that AGN physical parameters remain unchanged at higher redshifts and fainter luminosities, these sources could be regarded as the main drivers of cosmic reionization.
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We present a study of the distribution of X-ray detected active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the five most massive, $M_{500}^{SZ}>10^{14} M_{odot}$ , and distant, z$sim$1, galaxy clusters in the textit{Planck} and South Pole Telescope (SPT)textit{} surveys. The spatial and thermodynamic individual properties of each cluster have been defined with unprecedented accuracy at this redshift using deep X-ray observations. This is an essential property of our sample in order to precisely determine the $R_{500}^{Y_{textrm x}}$ radius of the clusters. For our purposes, we computed the X-ray point-like source surface density in 0.5$R_{500}^{Y_{textrm x}}$ wide annuli up to a clustercentric distance of 4$R_{500}^{Y_{textrm x}}$, statistically subtracting the background and accounting for the respective average density of optical galaxies. We found a significant excess of X-ray point sources between 2 and 2.5$R_{500}^{Y_{textrm x}}$ at the 99.9% confidence level. The results clearly display for the first time strong observational evidence of AGN triggering in the outskirts of high-redshift massive clusters with such a high statistical significance. We argue that the particular conditions at this distance from the cluster centre increase the galaxy merging rate, which is probably the dominant mechanism of AGN triggering in the outskirts of massive clusters.
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