Related papers: Quasar Structure and Cosmological Feedback
The general picture of how thermal AGNs work has become clearer in recent years but major observational puzzles threaten to undermine this picture. These puzzles include AGNs with extremely asymmetric emission line profiles, inconsistent…
The energy released by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is considered to have a profound impact on the cold gas properties of their host galaxies, potentially heating or removing the gas and further suppressing star formation. To understand…
Feedback heating from AGN in massive galaxies and galaxy clusters can be thought of as a naturally occurring control system which plays a significant role in regulating both star formation rates and the X-ray luminosity of the surrounding…
In the last decade, observations have accumulated on gas outflows in galaxies, and in particular massive molecular ones. The mass outflow rate is estimated between 1-5 times the star formation rate. For the highest maximal velocities, they…
Dwarf galaxies have historically posed challenges to the cold dark matter (CDM) model and, while many of the so-called 'dwarf galaxy problems' have been mitigated by incorporating baryonic processes, the observed diversity of dwarf galaxy…
Unopposed radiative cooling of plasma would lead to the cooling catastrophe, a massive inflow of condensing gas, manifest in the core of galaxies, groups and clusters. The last generation X-ray telescopes, Chandra and XMM, have radically…
We determine the properties of the stellar torus that we showed in a previous paper to result as a product of two merging black holes. If the surrounding stellar cluster is as massive as the binary black hole, the torque acting on the stars…
Cosmological observations are a powerful probe of neutrino properties, and in particular of their mass. In this review, we first discuss the role of neutrinos in shaping the cosmological evolution at both the background and perturbation…
Powerful relativistic jets in radio galaxies are capable of driving strong outflows but also inducing star-formation by pressure-triggering collapse of dense clouds. We review theoretical work on negative and positive active galactic nuclei…
Feedback from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is a key process in the evolution of massive halos in the Universe. New observational information on feedback is crucial for improving the implementation of the physics in numerical models. In this…
We propose a two-stage model for the effects of feedback from a bright quasar on the cold gas in a galaxy. It is difficult for feedback from near the accretion disk to directly impact dense molecular clouds at ~kpc. But if such feedback can…
Various studies have claimed that the fraction of obscured AGN drops with luminosity, but contrary results are also reported. We present our recent studies on the fraction of X-ray obscured quasars in Chandra Deep Fields and in the local…
The lack of very cool gas at the cores of groups and clusters of galaxies, even where the cooling time is significantly shorter than the Hubble time, has been interpreted as evidence of sources that re-heat the intergalactic medium. Most…
The theoretically expected amplitude of the associations of background quasars with foreground galaxies as a result of gravitational lensing has been updated in this paper. Since the galactic matter alone yields an amplitude of quasar…
Clustering measurements of obscured and unobscured quasars show that obscured quasars reside in more massive dark matter halos than their unobscured counterparts. These results are inconsistent with simple unified (torus) scenarios, but…
Strong gravitational lensing of quasars has the potential to unlock the poorly understood physics of these fascinating objects, as well as serve as a probe of the lensing mass distribution and of cosmological parameters. In particular,…
Powerful winds driven by active galactic nuclei (AGN) are often invoked to play a fundamental role in the evolution of both supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies, quenching star formation and explaining the tight…
The shining of quasars is a likely trigger of massive galatic winds, able to remove most ISM from a star-forming spheroid. However, the mechanism responsible for the deposition of energy into the ISM is still unclear. Starting from a model…
The huge luminosity of quasars and "twin''images of them could be explained using filamentary or planar cosmological structures acting as waveguides. We describe the gravitational waveguide theory and then we discuss possible realizations…
Some key issues in AGN and galaxy formation are discussed. Very successful Unified Models explain much of the variety of AGN with orientation effects; ingredients are shadowing by a dusty "torus" and relativistic beaming. A spinoff result…