Related papers: Why AGN Studies Need Higher Resolution
It is widely accepted that quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGN) are powered by accretion of matter onto a central supermassive black hole. While numerical simulations have demonstrated the importance of magnetic fields in…
An empirical relation between the broad line region (BLR) size and optical continuum luminosity is often adopted to estimate the BLR size and then the black hole mass of AGNs. However, optical luminosity may not be a good indicator of…
Due to the compactness active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are still unresolved with optical observations. However, structure and physical conditions of the matter in their central parts are especially important to study the processes of the…
A highly accurate computer program is used to study axially symmetric and stationary spacetimes containing a Black Hole surrounded by a ring of matter. It is shown that the matter ring affects the properties of the Black Hole drastically.…
We will briefly discuss the importance of sensitive X-ray observations above a few tens of keV for a better understanding of the physical mechanisms associated to the Supermassive Black Hole primary emission in both radio quiet and radio…
One of the main challenges in using high redshift active galactic nuclei to study the correlations between the mass of the supermassive Black Hole (MBH) and the properties of their active host galaxies is instrumental resolution. Strong…
Accreting black holes tend to display a characteristic dark central region called the black-hole shadow, which depends only on spacetime/observer geometry and which conveys information about the black hole's mass and spin. Conversely, the…
Eddington ratio is a paramount parameter governing the accretion history and life cycles of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). This short review presents a multi-faceted view of the importance of the Eddington ratio spanning varied AGN studies.…
We are now in an era where we can image details on the surfaces of stars. When resolving stellar surfaces, we see that every surface is uniquely complicated. Each imaged star provides insight into not only the stellar surface structures,…
The masses of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) can be derived spectroscopically via virial mass estimators based on selected broad optical/ultraviolet emission lines. These estimates commonly use the line width as a…
High-energy astrophysics is a relatively young scientific field, made possible by space-borne telescopes. During the half-century history of x-ray astronomy, the sensitivity of focusing x-ray telescopes-through finer angular resolution and…
Originally developed to image the shadow region of the central black hole in Sagittarius A* and in the nearby galaxy M87, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) provides deep, very high angular resolution data on other AGN sources too. The…
Recent JWST surveys of high-redshift galaxies have found surprisingly large black holes, with many being measured to be $\sim100$ times more massive than local galaxies with the same stellar mass. Here, we find that a population of these…
Growing supermassive black holes (Active Galactic Nuclei; AGN) release energy with the potential to alter their host galaxies and larger-scale environment; a process named "AGN feedback". Feedback is a required component of galaxy formation…
We put active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with low-mass black holes on the fundamental plane of black hole accretion---the plane that relates X-ray emission, radio emission, and mass of an accreting black hole---to test whether or not the…
The direct images of giant extrasolar planets recently obtained around several main sequence stars represent a major step in the study of planetary systems. These high-dynamic range images are among the most striking results obtained by the…
Discovering and studying obscured AGN at z>1-3 is important not only to complete the AGN census, but also because they can pinpoint galaxies where nuclear accretion and star-formation are coeval, and mark the onset of AGN feedback. We…
The evolution of AGN in groups and clusters provides important information about how their black holes grow, the extent to which galaxies and black holes coevolve in dense environments, and has implications for feedback in the local…
The growing use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for a broad range of visual tasks, including tasks involving fine details, raises the problem of applying such networks to a large field of view, since the amount of computations…
In a recent work we demonstrated that a novel X-ray scaling method, originally introduced for Galactic black holes (GBHs), can be reliably extended to estimate the mass of supermassive black holes accreting at a moderate to high level. Here…