Supermassive Black Holes in the Distant Universe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Observational Evidence for Supermassive Black Holes

   • Laura Ferrarese

   Pages 1-51

3. How are AGN Found?

   • Richard Mushotzky

   Pages 53-87

4. Theory of Disk Accretion onto Supermassive Black Holes

   • Philip J. Armitage

   Pages 89-126

5. Modeling the Accretion History of Supermassive Black Holes

   • Priyamvada Natarajan

   Pages 127-145

6. The Formation and Evolution of the First Massive Black Holes

   • Zoltán Haiman, Eliot Quataert

   Pages 147-185

7. A Panchromatic View of AGN

   • Guido Risaliti, Martin Elvis

   Pages 187-224

8. Distant X-Ray Galaxies: Insights from the Local Population

   • Edward C. Moran

   Pages 225-243

9. Compton-Thick AGN: The Dark Side of the X-Ray Background

   • Andrea Comastri

   Pages 245-272

10. The Accretion History of Supermassive Black Holes

    • Lennox L. Cowie, Amy J. Barger

    Pages 273-298

11. Back Matter

    Pages 299-304

    PDF

Quasars, and the menagerie of other galaxies with "unusual nuclei", now collectively known as Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN, have, in one form or another, sparked the interest of astronomers for over 60 years. The only known mechanism that can explain the staggering amounts of energy emitted by the innermost regions of these systems is gravitational energy release by matter falling towards a supermassive black hole --- a black hole whose mass is millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. AGN emit radiation at all wavelengths. X-rays originating at a distance of a few times the event horizon of the black hole are the emissions closest to the black hole that we can detect; thus, X-rays directly reveal the presence of active supermassive black holes. Oftentimes, however, the supermassive black holes that lie at the centers of AGN are cocooned in gas and dust that absorb the emitted low­ energy X-rays and the optical and ultraviolet light, hiding the black hole from view at these wavelengths. Until recently, this low-energy absorption presented a major obstacle in observational efforts to map the accretion history of the universe. In 1999 and 2000, the launches of the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories finally broke the impasse. The impact of these observatories on X-ray astronomy is similar to the impact that the Hubble Space Telescope had on optical astronomy. The astounding new data from these observatories have enabled astronomers to make enormous advances in their understanding of when accretion occurs.

• Accretion
• Galaxy
• Observatories
• Quasar
• Universe

• Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

  Amy J. Barger

• Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA

  Amy J. Barger

• Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA

  Amy J. Barger

Policies and ethics