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Constraining Supermassive Black Hole Seeding and Accretion via Occupation Fractions and Mass-Weighted Distributions

  • Gianni Sims
  • Vicki Sarajedini
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Abstract

The formation of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is a key open problem in galaxy evolution, with light- and heavy-seeding models predicting distinct black hole occupation fractions (BHOFs). Using multiwavelength observations from the LSST Deep Drilling Fields, we measure the AGN fraction and estimate the BHOF across 0<z<1. Applying a hierarchical Bayesian model, we find that the inferred BHOF remains 100% for host galaxy masses below 109 M⊙ at lower redshifts. These findings are consistent with light-seed scenarios. Additionally, we computed the black hole masses for several galaxies in the W-CDF-S to test the mass-weighted black hole occupation distributions from semi-analytic models (SAM). Using a reduced-χ2 analysis, we find that the data are consistent with the main-sequence accretion model regardless of the assumed seeding mechanism. These results provide new observational constraints on SMBH seeding and highlight the value of combining deep extragalactic surveys with probabilistic modeling.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@misc{sims2026constraining,
  title = {{Constraining Supermassive Black Hole Seeding and Accretion via Occupation Fractions and Mass-Weighted Distributions}},
  author = {Gianni Sims and Vicki Sarajedini},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.35673},
  eprint = {2610.35673},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35673},
}
RIS
TY  - UNPB
TI  - Constraining Supermassive Black Hole Seeding and Accretion via Occupation Fractions and Mass-Weighted Distributions
AU  - Gianni Sims
AU  - Vicki Sarajedini
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/26
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.35673
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35673
AB  - The formation of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is a key open problem in galaxy evolution, with light- and heavy-seeding models predicting distinct black hole occupation fractions (BHOFs). Using multiwavelength observations from the LSST Deep Drilling Fields, we measure the AGN fraction and estimate the BHOF across 0<z<1. Applying a hierarchical Bayesian model, we find that the inferred BHOF remains 100% for host galaxy masses below 10^9 M_⊙ at lower redshifts. These findings are consistent with light-seed scenarios. Additionally, we computed the black hole masses for several galaxies in the W-CDF-S to test the mass-weighted black hole occupation distributions from semi-analytic models (SAM). Using a reduced-χ^2 analysis, we find that the data are consistent with the main-sequence accretion model regardless of the assumed seeding mechanism. These results provide new observational constraints on SMBH seeding and highlight the value of combining deep extragalactic surveys with probabilistic modeling.
ER  -