Related papers: A Systematic Search for X-ray Eclipse Events in Ac…
Hard X-ray surveys like those provided by IBIS and BAT on board the INTEGRAL and Swift satellites list a significant number of sources which are unidentified and/or unclassified and which deserve multiwaveband observations to be properly…
The cosmic history of the growth of supermassive black holes in galactic centers parallels that of star-formation in the Universe. However, an important fraction of this growth occurs inconspicuously in obscured objects, where…
We present the results of our search for highly variable active galactic nuclei (AGNs) the X-ray flux from which changed by more than an order of magnitude during the SRG/eROSITA all-sky survey. Using the eROSITA data obtained in the period…
A significant number of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are observed to be hidden behind dust and gas. The distribution of material around AGNs plays an important role in modeling the cosmic X-ray background (CXB), especially the fraction of…
We provide evidence for a correlation between the presence of giant clumps and the occurrence of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in disk galaxies. Giant clumps of 10^8-9 Msun arise from violent gravitational instability in gas-rich galaxies,…
The X-ray emission from bright active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is believed to originate in a hot corona lying above a cold, geometrically thin accretion disk. A highly concentrated corona located within $\sim10$ gravitational radii above the…
Luminous X-ray outbursts with variability amplitudes as high as ~1000 have been detected from a small number of galactic nuclei. These events are likely associated with transient fueling of nuclear supermassive black holes. In this paper,…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) show evidence for reprocessing gas, outflowing from the accreting black hole. The combined effects of absorption and scattering from the circumnuclear material likely explains the `hard excess' of X-ray emission…
We present new estimates on the fraction of heavily X-ray obscured, Compton-thick (CT) active galactic nuclei (AGNs) out to a redshift of $z \leq$ 0.8. From a sample of 540 AGNs selected by mid-IR (MIR) properties in observed X-ray survey…
Through an optical campaign performed at 4 telescopes located in the northern and the southern hemispheres, plus archival data from two on-line sky surveys, we have obtained optical spectroscopy for 29 counterparts of unclassified or poorly…
The ability to accurately discern active massive black holes (BHs) in nearby dwarf galaxies is paramount to understanding the origins and processes of "seed" BHs in the early Universe. We present Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of a…
Which galaxies in the general population turn into active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is a keystone of galaxy formation and evolution. Thanks to SRG/eROSITA's contiguous 140 square degree pilot survey field, we constructed a large, complete, and…
A long-standing question is whether active galactic nuclei (AGN) vary like Galactic black hole systems when appropriately scaled up by mass (refs 1-3). If so, we can then determine how AGN should behave on cosmological timescales by…
In five years of operation, data from INTEGRAL has been used to discover a large number of gamma-ray sources, a substantial fraction of which have turned out to be active galactic nuclei (AGN). Recently Bassani et al. (2006) have presented…
Deep X-ray surveys have resolved much of the X-ray background radiation below 2 keV into discrete sources, but the background above 8 keV remains largely unresolved. The obscured (type 2) Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) that are expected to…
Heavily obscured accretion is believed to represent an important stage in the growth of supermassive black holes, and to play an important role in shaping the observed spectrum of the Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB). Hard X-ray (E$>$10 keV)…
We explore host galaxy properties and environment of a sample of Type 1 and 2 active galactic nuclei (AGN) taken from the COSMOS2015 catalog, within 0.3 $\leq z \leq$ 1.1 selected for their emission in X-rays, optical spectra and SED…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are supermassive black holes with luminous accretion disks found in some galaxies, and are thought to play an important role in galaxy evolution. However, traditional optical spectroscopy for identifying AGN…
The bulk of X-ray spectroscopic studies of active galactic nuclei (AGN) are focused on local ($z < 0.1$) sources with low-to-moderate ($< 0.3$) Eddington ratio ($\lambda_\mathrm{Edd}$). It is then mandatory to overcome this limitation and…
By analogy to the different accretion states observed in black-hole X-ray binaries (BHXBs), it appears plausible that accretion disks in active galactic nuclei (AGN) undergo a state transition between a radiatively efficient and inefficient…