| Speaker: | Andrea Merloni (MPE-Garching ) |
|---|---|
| Title: | Understanding AGN evolution with large (X-ray) surveys: current constraints and prospects for eROSITA |
| Date (JST): | Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 13:30 - 14:30 |
| Place: | Seminar Room A |
| Related File: | 2178.pdf |
| Abstract: |
The emergence of the three-dimensional structure of the cosmic web over the history of the Universe displays very distinctive features when observed in X-rays, where both the most massive collapsed structure (clusters of galaxies) and the most energetic events in the life of galaxies (AGN and Quasars) reveal themselves unambiguously. In the past 50 years, astronomers have used X-ray surveys to tackle fundamental questions for structure formation such as: How did supermassive black holes form and grow in the nuclei of galaxies? Why are their physical properties today so tightly linked to those of their hosts? What was the impact on the surrounding structures of the copious energy release, either in radiative or mechanical form, associated to the growth of such black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN)? I will show how state of the art observations with Chandra and XMM-Newton have been used to give at least partial answers to some of these questions. I will also highlight the major limitation of existing X-ray surveys: many crucial aspects of the study of the connection between AGN and host galaxies cannot be explored because of the limited volume of the Universe explored. The next generation of wide-area, sensitive X-ray surveys designed to map the hot and energetic Universe will be heralded by eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array), the core instrument on the Russian-German Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission, scheduled for launch in 2019. eROSITA will perform a deep survey of the entire X-ray sky, and will be about 30 times more sensitive than ROSAT in the soft energy band (0.5-2 keV), while in the hard band (2-8 keV) it will provide the first ever true imaging survey of the full sky. eROSITA is expected to yield a sample of around 3 million active galactic nuclei, which is bound to revolutionize our view of the evolution of supermassive black holes and their impact on the process of structure formation in the Universe. |
