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Significant progress has been made in the last few years on understanding how supermassive black holes form and grow. In this paper, we begin by reviewing the spectral signatures of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) ranging from radio to hard…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-03 Ezequiel Treister , C. Megan Urry

Active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback from accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is an essential ingredient of galaxy formation simulations. The orbital evolution of SMBHs is affected by dynamical friction that cannot be predicted…

Angular momentum, or spin, is a fundamental property of black holes (BHs), yet it is much more difficult to estimate than mass or accretion rate (for actively accreting systems). In recent years, high-quality X-ray observations have allowed…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-02-15 Daniel M. Capellupo , Gaylor Wafflard-Fernandez , Daryl Haggard

The origin of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) residing in the centers of most galaxies remains a mystery. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) provided direct imaging of the SMBH Sgr A* at the Milky Way's center, indicating it likely spins…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-08-28 Yihan Wang , Bing Zhang

We use a combination of a cosmological N-body simulation of the concordance Lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) paradigm and a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to investigate the spin development of central supermassive black holes (BHs)…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Claudia del P. Lagos , Nelson D. Padilla , Sofia A. Cora

The active galactic nucleus (AGN) accretion disks are ideal sites for hierarchical black hole (BH) mergers. To robustly probe such a possibility, we analyze binary black hole mergers in the GWTC-4 with a flexible mixture population model…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-09-30 Yin-Jie Li , Yuan-Zhu Wang , Shao-Peng Tang , Yi-Zhong Fan

Black hole systems, comprised of a black hole, accretion disk, and collimated outflow are studied here. Three AGN samples including 753 AGN, and 102 measurements of 4 GBH are studied. Applying the theoretical considerations described by…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2019-12-04 Ruth A. Daly

The mass ($M_\mathrm{BH}$) of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) can be measured using spatially-resolved kinematics of the region where the SMBH dominates gravitationally. The most reliable measurements are those that resolve the smallest…

This is the fourth paper in a series that reports on our investigation of the clustering properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) identified in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In this paper we…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-12-15 Mirko Krumpe , Takamitsu Miyaji , Bernd Husemann , Nikos Fanidakis , Alison L. Coil , Hector Aceves

Powerful winds driven by active galactic nuclei (AGN) are often invoked to play a fundamental role in the evolution of both supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies, quenching star formation and explaining the tight…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-05-25 Francesco Tombesi

Compact binary coalescences are the most promising sources of gravitational waves (GWs) for ground based detectors. Binary systems containing one or two spinning black holes are particularly interesting due to spin-orbit (and eventual…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2014-07-02 Salvatore Vitale , Ryan Lynch , John Veitch , Vivien Raymond , Riccardo Sturani

Active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks may be important sites of binary black hole (BBH) mergers. Here we show via numerical experiments with the high-accuracy, high precision code {\tt SpaceHub} that broken symmetry in dynamical encounters in…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2022-01-05 Yihan Wang , Barry McKernan , Saavik Ford , Rosalba Perna , Nathan W. C. Leigh , Mordecai-Mark Mac Low

Accretion disks around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei contain stars, stellar mass black holes, and other stellar remnants, which perturb the disk gas gravitationally. The resulting density perturbations in turn…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-03-16 Jillian Bellovary , Mordecai-Mark Mac Low , Barry McKernan , K. E. Saavik Ford

Galactic nuclei are promising sites for stellar origin black hole (BH) mergers, as part of merger hierarchies in deep potential wells. We show that binary black hole (BBH) merger rates in active galactic nuclei (AGN) should always exceed…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2022-12-07 K. E. Saavik Ford , Barry McKernan

The vast amount of energy released by active galactic nuclei (AGN) is increasingly recognized as a key driver of evolution not only in massive galaxies and clusters, but also in low-mass dwarf galaxies. Despite this, their role in the early…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-04 Mahsa Sanati , Julien Devriendt , SergioMartin-Alvarez , Adrianne Slyz , Jonathan C. Tan

It is well established that a dominant phase in the growth of massive galaxies occurred at high redshift and was heavily obscured by gas and dust. Many studies have explored the stellar growth of massive galaxies but few have combined these…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-23 D. M. Alexander

We present results of the clustering analysis between active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and galaxies at redshift 0.1-1.0 for investigating properties of galaxies associated with the AGNs, revealing the nature of fueling mechanism of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-02-17 Yuji Shirasaki , Yutaka Komiya , Masatoshi Ohishi , Yoshihiko Mizumoto

We review recent progress in studying accretion flows on to supermassive black holes (SMBH). Much of this removes earlier assumptions of symmetry and regularity, such as aligned and prograde disc rotation. This allows a much richer variety…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-16 Andrew King , Chris Nixon

We describe a program that we have embarked on to estimate the spins of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We fit the continuum X-ray spectrum of the radiation from the accretion disk using the standard thin disk model, and extract…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-08-01 Jeffrey E. McClintock , Ramesh Narayan , Rebecca Shafee

In this work, we study the propagation and spin oscillations of neutrinos in their scattering by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) surrounded by a realistic accretion disk. We review various descriptions of the fermion spin evolution in a…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-10-16 Mridupawan Deka , Maxim Dvornikov