Related papers: Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei and Obscured Accre…
Research over the past decade has shown diminishing empirical evidence for major galaxy mergers being a dominating or even important mechanism for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies and the triggering of optically or X-ray…
We study the host galaxies and black holes of typical X-ray selected AGN at intermediate redshifts (z~0.5-1.4). The AGN are selected such that their spectral energy distributions are dominated by stellar emission, i.e., they show a…
Ever since the discovery of the first Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), substantial observational and theoretical effort has been invested into understanding how massive black holes have evolved across cosmic time. Circum-nuclear obscuration is…
Nearby galactic nuclei are observed to be very much dimmer than active galactic nuclei in distant galaxies. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has provided a definitive explanation for why this is so. With its excellent angular resolution,…
As a result of deep hard X-ray observations by Chandra and XMM-Newton a significant fraction of the cosmic X-ray background (CXRB) has been resolved into individual sources. These objects are almost all active galactic nuclei (AGN) and…
The cores of active galactic nuclei (AGN) harbor some of the most extreme conditions of matter and energy in the Universe. One of the major goals of high-energy astrophysics is to probe these extreme environments in the vicinity of…
X-ray reflection generates much of the spectral complexity in the X-ray spectra of AGN. It is argued that strong relativistic blurring of the reflection spectrum should commonly be expected from objects accreting at a high Eddington rate.…
Understanding the relative roles of large-scale environment and internal host-galaxy processes in shaping AGN activity is essential for constraining models of black-hole growth and galaxy evolution. We investigate how the environment of…
We report on an optical (SDSS) and X-ray (XMM) study of an optically selected sample of four dual AGN systems at projected separations of 30--60~kpc. All sources are detected in the X-ray band (0.3-10 keV); seven objects are optically…
The cosmological evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is important for understanding the mechanism of accretion onto supermassive black holes, and the related evolution of the host galaxy. In this work, we include objects with very low…
The spectrum of the hard X-ray background records the history of accretion processes integrated over the cosmic time. Several observational and theoretical evidences indicate that a significant fraction of the energy density is obscured by…
The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) combines deep HST and Spitzer imaging with the deepest Chandra/XMM observations to probe obscured AGN at higher redshifts than previous multiwavelength surveys. We present a…
The luminosity function of active galactic nuclei has been measured down to luminosities ~10^{42} erg/s in the soft and hard X-rays. Some fraction of this activity is associated with the accretion of the material liberated by the tidal…
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…
Massive black holes are believed to reside at the centres of most galaxies. They can be- come detectable by accretion of matter, either continuously from a large gas reservoir or impulsively from the tidal disruption of a passing star, and…
We study the obscuring structure of circumnuclear disks (CNDs) by considering supernova (SN) feedbacks from nuclear starburst and the effect of anisotropic radiative pressure from AGNs. We suppose that the mass accretion onto a central…
We assess the potential of nuclear starburst disks to obscure the Seyfert-like AGN that dominate the hard X-ray background at z~1. Over 1200 starburst disk models, based on the theory developed by Thompson et al., are calculated for five…
We combine IR, optical and X-ray data from the overlapping, 9.3 square degree NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey (NDWFS), AGN and Galaxy Evolution Survey (AGES), and XBootes Survey to measure the X-ray evolution of 6146 normal galaxies as a…
We argue that the observed `accretion rate gap' - between black holes in radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN) accreting at close to the Eddington limit and those accreting at considerably lower rates - can be explained in terms of the…
Context: X-ray surveys of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) indicate `cosmic downsizing', with the comoving number density of high-luminosity objects peaking at higher redshifts (z about 2) than low-luminosity AGN (z<1). Aims: We test whether…