23 February 2024
Please join us for our first AGN vision talk of the year with our speaker, Kim Weaver, on Tuesday, February 27, 12pm Eastern.
For those new to the series, the AGN SIG’s vision series consist of 30 minute “vision” talks centered around the outstanding questions surrounding supermassive black holes, their origin, growth, and connection to galaxy evolution, followed by community discussion. This “AGN Vision Series” is meant to engage the community and to help steer the future directions of the field.
Title: X-ray Studies of Active Galactic Nuclei – Envisioning the Future
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.
We would be delighted to engage with you on the big questions and future directions in the field!
More information about joining the AGN SIG and their activities can be found here: AGN SIG