Galaxy Zoo: Bulgeless galaxies with growing black holes
The growth of supermassive black holes appears to be driven by galaxy mergers, violent merger-free processes and/or 'secular' processes. In order to quantify the effects of secular evolution on black hole growth, we study a sample of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in galaxies with a calm formation history free of significant mergers, a population that heretofore has been difficult to locate. Here we present an initial sample of 13 AGN in massive (M ≳ 10M) bulgeless galaxies - which lack the classical bulges believed inevitably to result from mergers - selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using visual classifications from Galaxy Zoo. Parametric morphological fitting confirms that the host galaxies lack classical bulges; any contributions from pseudo-bulges are very small (typically
Item Type | Article |
---|---|
Date Deposited | 15 May 2025 12:39 |
Last Modified | 30 May 2025 23:55 |
-
picture_as_pdf - 904966.pdf
-
subject - Submitted Version