English

Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars: Why Still a Puzzle after 50 years?

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-09-14 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

The first part of this article is a historical and physical introduction to quasars and their close cousins, called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In the second part, I argue that our progress in understanding them has been unsatisfactory and in fact somewhat illusory since their discovery fifty years ago, and that much of the reason is a pervasive lack of critical thinking in the research community. It would be very surprising if other fields do not suffer similar failings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.02001,
  title  = {Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars: Why Still a Puzzle after 50 years?},
  author = {Robert Antonucci},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.02001},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

26 pages, 2 figures, 1 appendix