Related papers: The Ghost in the Machine
Accretion near black holes (BHs) is multidimensional, with turbulence, resistivity, thermal transport, and dust dynamics all playing essential roles. In cold accretion discs (ADs) or the region of an AD where magnetic fields (MFs) are…
Recent X-ray observations reveal growing evidence for heating by active galactic nuclei (AGN) in clusters and groups of galaxies. AGN outflows play a crucial role in explaining the riddle of cooling flows and the entropy problem in…
As the luminosity of an accreting black hole drops to a few percent of Eddington, the spectrum switches from the familiar soft state to a hard state that is well-described by a distended and tenuous advection-dominated accretion flow…
The UV/optical and X-ray variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN) have long been expected to be well correlated as a result of the X-ray illumination of the accretion disk. Recent monitoring campaigns of nearby AGN, however, found that…
A simple and robust experiment demonstrating computational ghost imaging with structured illumination and a single-pixel detector has been performed. Our experimental setup utilizes a general computer for generating pseudo-randomly patterns…
The spectra of quasars and NLS1 galaxies show surprising similarity in their spectral shape. They seem to scale only with the accretion rate. This is in contradiction with the simple expectations from the standard disk model which predicts…
Using high-resolution 3-D and 2-D (axisymmetric) hydrodynamic simulations in spherical geometry, we study the evolution of cool cluster cores heated by feedback-driven bipolar active galactic nuclei (AGN) jets. Condensation of cold gas, and…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) play a crucial role in galaxy evolution by influencing the observational properties of their host galaxies. We investigate the host galaxy properties of X-ray selected AGNs, focusing on differences between…
We investigated the gas obscuration and host galaxy properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) during the peak of cosmic accretion growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at redshift 0.8-1.8 using X-ray detected AGN with mid-infrared and…
Modelling AGN feedback in numerical simulations is both technically and theoretically challenging, with numerous approaches having been published in the literature. We present a study of five distinct approaches to modelling AGN feedback…
Mass and spin are two fundamental properties of astrophysical black holes. While some established, indirect methods are adopted to measure both these properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) when viewed relatively face-on, very few…
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…
A tachyon is considered to be sick in the context of particle mechanics, but in field theory just indicates instability of a background. We consider a similar possibility that a ghost in field theory might be just an indication of…
The main characteristics of the average spectrum of radio quiet AGN in the UV and X-ray range are reviewed, and the emission mechanisms are discussed in the framework of accretion disk models, in particular the ``irradiated cold…
We introduce a new model for understanding AGN continuum variability. We start from a Shakura--Sunyaev thin accretion disc with a steady-state radial temperature profile $T(R)$ and assume that the variable flux is due to axisymmetric…
The discovery of changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL AGNs), with appearance and disappearance of broad emission lines and/or with strong variation of line-of-sight column density within a few years, challenges the AGN unification…
Using grid-based hydrodynamics simulations and analytic modeling, we compute the electromagnetic (EM) signatures of gravitational wave (GW) driven inspirals of massive black hole binaries that accrete gas from circumbinary disks, exploring…
At low Eddington ratio (mdot), two effects make it harder to detect AGN given some selection criteria. First, even with fixed accretion physics, AGN are diluted/less luminous relative to their hosts; the magnitude of this depends on host…
A long-standing puzzle in the study of black-hole accretion concerns the presence or not of thermal instability. Classical theory predicts the encircling accretion disk is unstable, as do some self-consistent MHD simulations of the flow.…
Long X-ray observations of bright Active Galactic Nuclei show that X-ray eclipses, with durations from a few hours to a few days, are rather common. This opens up a new window of opportunity in the search for signatures of relativistic…