Suggested Searches

 

AGN SIG Seminar

Active Galactic Nuclei Science Interest Group

DATE

Mar 04, 2024

TIME

12:00 pm EST

COMMUNITY

IR STIG

TYPE

Seminar

X-ray Studies of Active Galactic Nuclei – Envisioning the Future

Kim Weaver

Accreting active galactic nuclei (AGN) are powerful X-ray sources. While astronomers have been sleuthing the origins of the AGN phenomenon for decades, the most concrete proof of their supermassive black hole “monsters” was only recently obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope. This long-term path of discovery has required increasingly better spatial resolution. The irony is that the powerful X-ray emission regions near galaxy cores are still places that we cannot see directly because X-ray telescope imaging has fallen orders of magnitude behind current interferometry techniques in other wavebands. I will discuss some of the key outstanding science questions of AGN that require milli-arcsecond resolution in the X-rays and a new mission concept idea utilizing X-ray interferometry capabilities to support breakthrough science in the decades to come.

News Straight to Your Inbox

Subscribe to your community email news list

We will never share your email address.

Privacy Policy

Sign Up
An illustration of Sun-like star HD 181327 and its surrounding debris disk. The star is at top right. It is surrounded by a far larger debris disk that forms an incomplete ellpitical path and is cut off at right. There’s a huge cavity between the star and the disk. The debris disk is shown in shades of light gray. Toward the top and left, there are finer, more discrete points in a range of sizes. The disk appears hazier and smokier at the bottom. The star is bright white at center, with a hazy blue region around it. The background of space is black. The label Artist's Concept appears at lower left.