A Correlation between Star Formation Rate and Average Black Hole Accretion in Star-forming Galaxies (Proceeding of IAUS304: Multiwavelength AGN Surveys and Studies)

We present the results of recent studies on the co-evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) using Herschel far-infrared and Chandra X-ray observations in the Bo\"otes survey region. For a sample of star-forming (SF) galaxies, we find a strong correlation between galactic star formation rate and the average SMBH accretion rate in SF galaxies. Recent studies have shown that star formation and AGN accretion are only weakly correlated for individual AGN, but this may be due to the short variability timescale of AGN relative to star formation. Averaging over the full AGN population yields a strong linear correlation between accretion and star formation, consistent with a simple picture in which the growth of SMBHs and their host galaxies are closely linked over galaxy evolution time scales.
Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Contributed talk to appear in the proceedings of IAU S304:Multiwavelength AGN Surveys and Studies, Yerevan, Armenia, Oct. 2013