Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma

The early growth of (super)massive black holes
2016-02-02 11:45 - 12:45 (Europe/Rome) | Aula Gratton
With detections of quasars powered by increasingly massive black holes
(BH) at increasingly early times in cosmic history over the past decade,
there has been correspondingly rapid progress made on the theory of early
BH formation and growth. I review the emerging picture of how the first
massive BHs formed from the primordial gas and then grew to supermassive
scales, and discuss the initial conditions for the formation of the
progenitors of these seed BHs, the factors dictating the initial masses
with which they form, and their initialstages of growth via accretion,
which may occur at super-Eddington rates.

Exploring the realm of an AGN
2016-01-26 11:45 - 13:00
The environment of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is the result of accretion and injection of matter in and around a supermassive black hole. Through high resolution X-ray spectroscopy of both present and future instruments, the most extreme gas environments of the AGN can be studied. In this talk I will present our recent results on outflows and obscuration in AGN. I will also illustrate the tremendous improvement that future instruments will offer in this field.
