Françoise Combes

Active Galactic Nuclei (eBook, ePUB)

Fueling and feedback

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Almost all galaxies host in their center a supermassive black hole of mass between a million and tens of billions solar masses. Most of the time, the supermassive black hole is starving and is not radiating; it can be detected only through gravitational perturbations, high velocities of the matter very close to the center, within a thousandth of the galaxy radius. During a small percentage of its life, the supermassive black hole accretes surrounding matter, giving rise to an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). At the height of its power, an AGN or quasar can radiate 1000 times more than its host galaxy, and its hundreds of billion stars.

This book gives a general review of our current knowledge of AGN, powered by supermassive black holes: how they are fueled by gas (or stars) and what problems are encountered; how can we account for the wide variety of AGN, from Seyfert/Liners to quasars, and for the two types (AGN 1 and 2) either through dust obscuration, and geometrical orientation arguments, or through intrinsic activity difference, qualitative or quantitative. With modern instruments, providing high resolution and sensitivity, like ALMA in radio, or MUSE at the ESO/VLT, it is possible to unveil the interstellar medium and stars in the circumnuclear regions, discover molecular disks and tori, in the sphere of influence of the black holes. While AGN are accreting matter, they are providing so much energy that part of the surrounding gas is expelled and is observed in molecular outflows, identified as the main feedback process of AGN on their host.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Institute of Physics Publishing
• Seitenzahl: 120
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Dezember 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780750330350
• Artikelnr.: 63098220

Autorenporträt

Francoise Combes is an astrophysicist at Paris Observatory, working on galaxy formation and evolution, on dark matter models and active galactic nuclei. She has been a Professor at College de France since 2014, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2004. She has been an editor for Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003. She has received the Gold Medal of CNRS in 2020, and the L'Oreal-Unesco International award for women in Science in 2021.