BASS. XXXVI. Constraining the Local Supermassive Black Hole - Halo Connection with BASS DR2 AGN

Understand

We investigate the connection between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host dark matter halos in the local universe using the clustering statistics and luminosity function of AGN from the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic survey (BASS DR2).

• By forward-modeling AGN activity into snapshot halo catalogs from N-body simulations, we test a scenario in which SMBH mass correlates with dark matter (sub)halo mass for fixed stellar mass.
• We compare this to a model absent of this correlation, where stellar mass alone determines the SMBH mass.
• We find that while both simple models are able to largely reproduce the abundance and overall clustering of AGN, the model in which black hole mass is tightly correlated with halo mass is preferred by the data by $1.8\sigma$.