Supermassive black holes in cosmological simulations II
By Mélanie Habouzit
The paper presents the first exhaustive comparison of the AGN populations produced in large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. While these simulations all produce galaxy’s properties in broad agreement with the properties of observed galaxies, we find that the population of AGN produced varies from one simulation to another.
This has large implications for the upcoming Athena X-ray mission. Our work shows that there is currently no consensus on the predicted number of AGN that could be detected by Athena. The predictions from the simulations span about one order of magnitude. This is very exciting as the high sensitivity of Athena will thus provide us with a crucial pathway to disentangle these simulations and to constrain their BH and galaxy modeling!