Accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) play an important role in the evolution of galaxies. However, it is still unclear how SMBHs accrete and interact with their host galaxy. Understanding the properties of their parsec/sub-parsec environments would provide fundamental information on these processes. This project will use a novel approach to understand the structure and evolution of the inner regions of accreting SMBHs. This will be done using a new platform for X-ray simulations: RefleX (Paltani & Ricci 2017). RefleX allows to include all the components of SMBHs (accretion disk, BLR, torus, NLR and polar wind), and to create realistic X-ray spectral models. Using the results of high-resolution submm (ALMA) and IR (VLT/MIDI) observations, we will study the morphological and spectral characteristics of nearby SMBHs in the X-ray band, which will allow us to obtain fundamental information on the geometry, physical properties and evolution of the material around SMBHs.
Type of project: Research – actively recruiting new young researchers
Status: Ongoing
Researchers: Claudio Ricci
Funding source: ESO-Chile