Related papers: Piecing Together the X-ray Background: Bolometric …
The black-hole/accretion-disk paradigm for active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is now reasonably secure, but there are still important unresolved issues, some of which will require the capabilities of an 8 to 10-m class UV/optical space-based…
X-ray observations of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) reveal relativistic reflections from the innermost regions of accretion disks, which contain general-relativistic footprints caused by spinning supermassive black holes (SMBH). We…
The innermost regions in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) were not being spatially resolved so far but spectropolarimetry can provide us insight about their hidden physics and the geometry. From spectropolarimetric observations in broad…
Despite their factor of ~10^8 difference in black hole mass, several lines of evidence suggest possible similarities between black hole accretion flows in active galactic nuclei (AGN) and Galactic X-ray binaries. However, it is still…
We study, by means of dedicated simulations of massive black hole build-up, the possibility to constraint the existence and nature of the AGN population at z>6 with available and planned X-ray and near infrared space telescopes. We find…
A thorough study of radio emission in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is of fundamental importance to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for the emission and the interplay between accretion and ejection processes. High frequency…
X-ray spectroscopy offers an opportunity to study the complex mixture of emitting and absorbing components in the circumnuclear regions of active galactic nuclei, and to learn about the accretion process that fuels AGN and the feedback of…
We present a study of the multi-wavelength properties, from the mid-infrared to the hard X-rays, of a sample of 255 spectroscopically identified X-ray selected Type-2 AGN from the XMM-COSMOS survey. Most of them are obscured the X-ray…
Hard X-rays observed in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are thought to originate from the Comptonization of the optical/UV accretion disk photons in a hot corona. Polarization studies of these photons can help to constrain the corona geometry…
We have incorporated the description of the X-ray properties of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) into a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, adopting physically motivated scaling laws for accretion triggered by galaxy encounters. Our model…
The origin of the tight scaling relation between the mass of supermassive black holes (SMBHs; $M_{\rm BH}$) and their host-galaxy properties remains unclear. Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) probe phases of ongoing SMBH growth and offer the…
We present a X-ray spectral analysis of a large sample of 25 'bare' active galactic nuclei, sources with little or no complicating intrinsic absorption, observed with Suzaku. Our work focuses on studying the potential contribution from…
We investigate the X-ray variability properties of Seyfert1 Galaxies belonging to the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS). The sample includes 151 unobscured (N$_{\rm H}<10^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$) AGNs observed with XMM-Newton for a total exposure…
(Abridged) We complete the census of nuclear X-ray activity in 100 early type Virgo galaxies observed by the Chandra X-ray Telescope as part of the AMUSE-Virgo survey, down to a (3sigma) limiting luminosity of 3.7E+38 erg/s over 0.5-7 keV.…
Disk continuum reverberation mapping is one of the primary ways we learn about active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disks. Reverberation mapping assumes that time-varying X-rays incident on the accretion disk drive variability in…
Recent studies of active galactic nuclei (AGN) found a statistical inverse linear scaling between the X-ray normalized excess variance $\sigma_{\rm rms}^2$ (variability amplitude) and the black hole mass spanning over $M_{\rm BH}=10^6-…
The Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB) is the total emission from past accretion activity onto supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) and peaks in the hard X-ray band (30 keV). In this paper, we identify a significant selection…
We use morphological information of X-ray selected AGN hosts to set limits on the fraction of the accretion density of the Universe at z~1 that is not likely to be associated with major mergers. Deep X-ray observations are combined with…
We combine a semi-analytic galaxy formation model (Nulsen and Fabian 1997) with a prescription for the obscured growth of massive black holes (Nulsen and Fabian 2000; Fabian 1999), to reproduce the hard X-ray background (XRB), the local…
We use 317,000 emission-line galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate line-ratio selection of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). In particular, we demonstrate that "star formation dilution" by HII regions causes a significant…