Blowing in the wind: studying AGN feedback through X-ray spectroscopy of nuclear winds

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Speaker :  
Dr. Matteo Guainazzi (ESA/ESTEC, Spain)
Location :  
3rd Floor Seminar Room
Date :  

Time : 

Abstract :

A super-massive black hole (SMBH) sits at the center of most, if not all, bulge galaxies. The black hole gravitational potential dominates the gas dynamics on a tiny (~pc^3) spatial scale only. However, a tight relation exists between black hole mass and the stellar velocity dispersion in the bulge - one of the fundamental relations in modern extra-galactic astrophysics. This suggests that black holes can affect the interstellar gas and the star formation across the whole host galaxy. This happens through a still poorly understood process called "AGN feedback". In this talk I review the observational evidence on outflows launched close to SMBHs, indicating that they may be playing a fundamental role in AGN feedback, in agreement with the prediction of cosmological simulations of galaxy evolution. This process could have occurred in our own Galaxy as well, as recent observational results on IRAS17020+4544, an intriguing Milky Way "twin", indicate.