Dormant black holes tell a story about the evolution of active galactic nuclei

In our recent paper (Salucci et al. 1998) we have investigated the mass distribution function of massive dark objects in galaxies, exploiting the available optical and radio observations. Under the assumption that massive black holes power active galactic nuclei, we have compared the mass functions of massive dark objects and black holes responsible for the observed activity. We have found that a scenario with a single short burst per active galactic nucleus is in a good agreement with the available data. Here we summarize and discuss the main points of our study.