Journal
NATURE
Volume 549, Issue 7673, Pages 488-+Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature23906
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
- FONDECYT [1141218, 1160999]
- Basal-CATA [PFB-06/2007]
- China-CONICYT fund
- Swiss National Science Foundation [PP00P2 138979, PP00P2 166159]
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the Ambizione fellowship [PZ00P2 154799/1]
- NASA ADAP award [NNH16CT03C]
- Chinese Academy of Science [XDB09030102]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [11473002]
- Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2016YFA0400702]
- ERC [340442]
- Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism's Millennium Science Initiative [IC120009]
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT) [17K05384]
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/N000927/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [17K05384] Funding Source: KAKEN
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The majority of the accreting supermassive black holes in the Universe are obscured by large columns of gas and dust(1-3). The location and evolution of this obscuring material have been the subject of intense research in the past decades(4,5), and are still debated. A decrease in the covering factor of the circumnuclear material with increasing accretion rates has been found by studies across the electromagnetic spectrum(1,6-8). The origin of this trend may be driven by the increase in the inner radius of the obscuring material with incident luminosity, which arises from the sublimation of dust(9); by the gravitational potential of the black hole(10); by radiative feedback(11-14); or by the interplay between outflows and inflows(15). However, the lack of a large, unbiased and complete sample of accreting black holes, with reliable information on gas column density, luminosity and mass, has left the main physical mechanism that regulates obscuration unclear. Here we report a systematic multi-wavelength survey of hard-X-rayselected black holes that reveals that radiative feedback on dusty gas is the main physical mechanism that regulates the distribution of the circumnuclear material. Our results imply that the bulk of the obscuring dust and gas is located within a few to tens of parsecs of the accreting supermassive black hole (within the sphere of influence of the black hole), and that it can be swept away even at low radiative output rates. The main physical driver of the differences between obscured and unobscured accreting black holes is therefore their mass-normalized accretion rate.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available