Physics Colloquium: AGN Narrow-Line Region Kinematics

Travis Fischer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will present a physics colloquium, "AGN Narrow-Line Region Kinematics : Dissecting Spatially Resolved AGN Feedback," at 4 p.m. today, Feb. 9, in the Paul Sharrah Lecture Hall, PHYS 133.

Refreshments will be served in PHYS 134 beforehand at 3:30 p.m.

Active galactic nuclei, or AGN, are supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies that actively gain mass from the surrounding matter of accretion disks. This accretion process in turn generates feedback in the form of massive outflows of ionized gas, which are thought to play a pivotal role in large scale structure formation in the early Universe and self-regulation of SMBH and galactic bulge growth. Feedback is currently used to explain the MBH-σ∗ relation, which relates the SMBH mass and the stellar velocity dispersion of the bulge, where evacuation of gas from the bulge quenches star formation and halts the growth of both the SMBH and bulge.

Fischer will discuss ongoing investigations on the properties of AGN feedback in order to determine the validity of this explanation through analysis of the frequency and impact of mass outflows from AGN.