相关论文: Why Do AGN Lighthouses Switch Off?
We present evidence of the co-existence of either an AGN or an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), together with a young super stellar cluster in the 3 central parsecs of NGC4303. The galaxy contains a low luminosity AGN and hosts a number of…
We present new Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope observations of eight optically selected broad-line AGN candidates in nearby dwarf galaxies ($z<0.055$). Including archival Chandra observations of three additional…
The X-ray properties of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) depend on their underlying physical parameters, particularly the accretion rate. We identified eight reverberation-mapped AGNs with some of the largest known accretion rates without…
Most accreting black holes emit a substantial fraction of their luminosity in hard X-rays/soft $\gamma$-rays of up to $\sim{\rm few}\times100$ keV. The observations suggest that the radiating gas is very hot, $T>10^9$ K, and optically thin.…
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…
The Bondi accretion rate of black holes in our and nearby galaxies Messier 87, NGC 3115, NGC 1600, and Cygnus A have been determined or constrained using Chandra or other observations. It, however, remains unknown how much mass from the…
The X-ray emission from bright active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is believed to originate in a hot corona lying above a cold, geometrically thin accretion disk. A highly concentrated corona located within $\sim10$ gravitational radii above the…
Sgr A*, the putative black hole in our Galactic Center (GC), is extraordinary dim in all frequencies. Apparently the black hole is unable to accrete at the Bondi accretion rate for some reason. Another mystery of Sgr A* is the recently…
We report on exploratory Chandra observations of five galactic nuclei that were found to be X-ray bright during the ROSAT all-sky survey (with L_X > 10^43 erg s^-1) but subsequently exhibited a dramatic decline in X-ray luminosity. Very…
The X-ray mission Chandra has observed a dramatic X-ray flare -- a brightening by a factor of 50 for only three hours -- from Sgr A*, the Galactic Center supermassive black hole. Sgr A* has never shown variability of this amplitude in the…
We present numerical models of the gas dynamics in the inner parsec of the Galactic centre. We follow the gas from its origin as stellar winds of several observed young massive stars, until it is either captured by the central black hole,…
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 process that prevents the deposition of cooled gas in cooling flows must rely on feedback in order to maintain gas with short cooling times, while preventing the bulk of the gas from cooling to low temperatures. The primary candidate…
Accretion disks around stellar-mass black holes offer unique opportunities to study the fundamental physics of standard thin disks, super-Eddington disks, and structure that may be connected to flux variability. These local analogues of…
Most supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are accreting at very low levels and are difficult to distinguish from the galaxy centers where they reside. Our own Galaxy's SMBH provides a uniquely instructive exception, and we present a close-up…
The galactic black hole binary systems give an observational template showing how the accretion flow changes as a function of increasing mass accretion rate, or L/L_Edd. These data can be synthetised with theoretical models of the accretion…
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…
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…
Observations and theoretical simulations suggest that a significant fraction of merger-triggered accretion onto supermassive black holes is highly obscured, particularly in late-stage galaxy mergers, when the black hole is expected to grow…
The discovery of hard, power-law X-ray emission from a sample of six nearby elliptical galaxies, including the dominant galaxies of the Virgo,Fornax and Centaurus clusters (M87, NGC 1399 and NGC 4696, respectively), and NGC 4472, 4636 and…