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Extreme supermassive black hole accretion

Extremely rapid episodes of accretion are expected to be fundamental in a large variety of persistent and transient phenomena, and are needed to explain the rapid growth of the first supermassive black holes (SMBHs). However, among all accretion modes, this phase is still the least understood, due to the small number of super-Eddington sources identified in the local Universe. Thanks to recent dedicated observational campaigns, and to the advent of large time-domain photometric and spectroscopic surveys, such as LSST (2024) and 4MOST (2024), we are now entering the best time to study extreme accretion. With this research program we plan to chart the unexplored territory of Super-Eddington accretion, by systematically studying persistent and transient extreme accretion events in the local Universe, and by comparing them to slowly accreting SMBHs. We will probe all scales of the accretion process, from a few light-hours to hundreds of parsecs. Multi-wavelength and X-ray observations of transients and local super-Eddington AGN will be used to constrain the electromagnetic signatures of the accretion flow during these event

Type of project: Research – actively recruiting new young researchers
Status: Ongoing
Researchers: Claudio Ricci
Funding source: Funding source: FONDECYT Regular, Basal CATA2

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