The Environmental Impact of Supermassive Black Holes

Abstract

The supermassive black holes observed at the centers of almost all present-day galaxies had a profound impact on their environment. I highlight the principle of self-regulation, by which supermassive black holes grow until they release sufficient energy to unbind the gas that feeds them from their host galaxy. This principle explains several observed facts, including the correlation between the mass of a central black hole and the depth of the gravitational potential well of its host galaxy, and the abundance and clustering properties of bright quasars in the redshift interval of z~ 2–6. At lower redshifts, quasars might have limited the maximum mass of galaxies through the suppression of cooling flows in X-ray clusters. The seeds of supermassive black holes were likely planted in dwarf galaxies at redshifts z> 10, through the collapse of massive or supermassive stars. The minimum seed mass can be identified observationally through the detection of gravitational waves from black hole binaries by Advanced LIGO or LISA. Aside from shaping their host galaxies, quasar outflows filled the intergalactic medium with magnetic fields and heavy elements. Beyond the reach of these outflows, the brightest quasars at z>6 have ionized exceedingly large volumes of gas (tens of comoving Mpc) prior to global reionization, and must have suppressed the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function in these volumes before the same occurred through the rest of the universe.