Related papers: What Can We Learn from Nearby AGNs?
This contribution reviews the properties of nuclear activity in nearby galaxies, with emphasis on results obtained from current optical surveys and multiwavelength follow-up observations thereof.
I discuss some recent observational results in the research of nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN). These results cover three main topics: (i) evidences for the current paradigm for AGN's, which include a nuclear supermassive blackhole…
A significant fraction of nearby galaxies show evidence of weak nuclear activity unrelated to normal stellar processes. Recent high-resolution, multiwavelength observations indicate that the bulk of this activity derives from black hole…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are highly energetic astrophysical sources powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes in galaxies, which present unique observational signatures covering the full electromagnetic spectrum (and more) over…
In this paper we give a brief review of the astrophysics of active galactic nuclei (AGN). After a general introduction motivating the study of AGNs, we discuss our present understanding of the inner workings of the central engines, most…
A significant fraction of local galaxies show evidence of nuclear activity. I argue that the bulk of this activity, while energetically not remarkable, derives from accretion onto a central massive black hole. The statistics of nearby…
It has long been suspected that Active Galactic Nuclei are powered by accretion of matter onto massive black holes and this belief implies their presence in the nuclei of most nearby galaxies as "relics" of past activity. Just a few years…
In this review the correlations between host galaxy properties and black-hole mass determined from nearby quiescent galaxies are briefly discussed, before proceeding to investigate their application to active galactic nuclei (AGN). The…
The centers of elliptical galaxies host supermassive black holes that significantly affect the surrounding interstellar medium through feedback resulting from the accretion process. The evolution of this gas and of the nuclear emission…
The relationship of an AGN to its host galaxy is a crucial question in the study of galaxy evolution. We perform stellar population synthesis in the central regions of galaxies of different activity levels. A large number of stellar…
We examine the relationship between galaxies, supermassive black holes and AGN using a sample of 22,000 narrow-emission-line AGN drawn from a a sample of 122,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We have studied how AGN host…
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…
We summarize what large surveys of the contemporary universe have taught us about the physics and phenomenology of the processes that link the formation and evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes. We present a…
Accretion flows toward black holes can be of a quite different nature, described as an optically thick cool gas flow in a disk for high accretion rates or as a hot coronal optically thin gas flow for low accretion rates, possibly affected…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are energetic astrophysical sources powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes in galaxies, and present unique observational signatures that cover the full electromagnetic spectrum over more than twenty…
It is now widely believed that the growth of massive black holes is closely linked to the formation of galaxies, but there have been few concrete constraints on the actual physical processes responsible for this coupling. Investigating the…
The material surrounding accreting supermassive black holes connects the active galactic nucleus (AGN) with its host galaxy and, besides being responsible for feeding the black hole, provides important information on the feedback that…
Galaxy mergers provide a mechanism for galaxies to effectively funnel gas and materials toward their nuclei and fuel the central starbursts and accretion of supermassive black holes. In turn, the active nuclei drive galactic-scale outflows…
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…
We study the environmental effects on the activity in galactic nuclei by comparing galaxies in clusters and in the field. Using a spectroscopic sample of galaxies in Abell clusters from the SDSS DR7, we investigate the dependence of nuclear…