The project has been conducted in two work packages (WPs).
WP1 consists of developing a phenomenological model that links the buildup of galaxies and supermassive black holes over cosmic time. This WP has led to two 1st-author peer-reviewed papers, five contributed talks at international conferences, four guest seminars at various research Institutes during collaboration visits. On the one hand, I made use of the latest available X-ray data as a direct indicator of "radiative" AGN activity. On the other hand, I used deep de-blended infrared and sub-mm photometry as a proxy for dust-unbiased SFR, for a stellar mass selected sample of over 190,000 galaxies in the COSMOS field. Such a plethora of data enabled me to connect the occurrence and strength of X-ray AGN activity to galaxy star formation, as a function of galaxy stellar mass, SFR (i.e. main sequence vs starbursts) and redshift, since z=3.
The main results that I obtained from the first sub-project of WP1 are the following: (i) SMBH accretion and star formation do not seem to evolve in lockstep, whereas AGN activity is enhanced relative to star formation in more massive galaxies; (ii) the vast majority of SMBH accretion (>80%) occurs within normal "main sequence" galaxies, while "starburst" galaxies standing well above the main sequence show a sub-dominant contribution (<20%) to the global AGN accretion history since z~5. In the second sub-project of WP1, I developed a phenomenological model that describes the buildup of SMBHs and galaxies over time. This was fully anchored to the empirically-motivated findings constrained in the first part of this work, which favours AGN activity over star formation in more massive galaxies. This has led to the following results: (i) galaxy and SMBH growth occur in two steps. At first the central SMBH starves behind the galaxy, while later the BH catches up. (ii) This twofold growth might be driven by the dark matter halo mass, that does play an important role in funnelling the gas inside the host galaxy, which, in turn, regulates the amount of gas that trickles toward the central SMBH.
WP2 is composed of two sub-projects tied to each other: re-calibrating the radio-SFR relation for an unbiased stellar mass selected sample of galaxies; and studying the distribution of radio-AGN power as a function of galaxy properties. Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, only the first part has been completed (1st-author paper is currently under review), while the second sub-project is on good track. In addition, all conferences at which I was supposed to disseminate the results of this WP have been cancelled or postponed to 2021. This has obviously reduced the visibility of the project. The main results achieved so far in WP2 is that the radio-SFR relation is not constant across all galaxies (contrary to what believed until now) but depends primarily on galaxy stellar mass. In particular, more massive galaxies are brighter in the radio than in the infrared (i.e. SFR) as compared to less massive analogues. The predictive power of this finding is immense, since it allows us to make first accurate predictions for the radio faint star-forming population down to micro-Jy levels, which will be routinely reached with the advent of the SKA.
