Interplay Between Supermassive Black holes, Galaxies, and Dark Matter Halos Revealed by Discrepancies with Cosmological Simulations

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) may be crucial to stifle star formation [1–5], but understanding their effects is limited by a lack of reliable measurements for host galaxies of actively accreting SMBHs. Here we present comprehensive measurements for about 40,000 nearby active SMBHs, including star formation rates, stellar masses, and multi-scale environments, along with precise halo mass estimates for galaxies in the SDSS and GAMA surveys. We use these new benchmarks to reveal that SMBH feedback physics in three prominent cosmological simulations is overly aggressive, consistently producing too many low-mass quiescent galaxies in high-mass halos. In contrast, observed galaxies with active SMBHs are predominantly located in relatively low-mass halos and in gas-rich, star-forming galaxies, broadly consistent with simulation results. However, major discrepancies remain in the the large-scale distribution of stellar mass in galaxies and there environments as well as the number density functions for stellar mass, star formation rates, black hole mass, and accretion luminosity. Our results suggest that past, cumulative SMBH activity alters halo-scale environments over long timescales, while the impact of current SMBH activity on star formation in the host galaxy or other halo members is minimal.