Assigned ID: 260 ----- Attempting Submission 1 (Fri Feb 25 02:27:05 GMT 2011) ----- Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are thought to represent an integral phase in the formation and evolution of galaxies during which the central supermassive black hole (BH) is growing through accretion. The tight empirical relations between BH mass and the global properties of the host galaxy spheroid discovered in the local Universe have been explained by a combination of AGN feedback and hierarchical assembly of BH and stellar mass through galaxy merging. A number of groups (including ourselves) have studied the evolution with redshift of the BH mass scaling relations, revealing evidence that BH growth precedes spheroid assembly. However, this tantalizing result is highly uncertain because it is based on small samples at high redshift and dominated by systematic uncertainties when comparing UV luminosities at z~1-2 with those in the local Universe. We propose to take a major step forward, by taking advantage of the virtues of GOODS for a large sample of ~55 AGN hosts with 1<z<2, allowing us to determine for the first time offset and intrinsic scatter of the BH mass-spheroid stellar mass relation. The multi-filter data coupled with our novel joint multiwavelength analysis technique will be equivalent to a ten-fold increase in quality over existing studies allowing us to determine stellar mass of the host bulge and disk component. The use of stellar masses will eliminate the need for uncertain luminosity-evolution corrections and allow us to measure directly the evolution of the correlations. We can thus test the hypothesis that the evolution is driven by disks being transformed into bulges by mergers or secular processes.

COSMOLOGY 12 Small false 0.0 0.0 false false false false SUPPORTED