Abstract Details
| Name: Susmita Chakravorty Affiliation: IISc, Bengaluru Conference ID: ASI2019_397 Title : Winds in Active Galactic Nuclei Authors and Co-Authors : Susmita Chakravorty Abstract Type : Invited Abstract Category : Extragalactic Astronomy Abstract : Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) represent the growth phases of the super-massive black holes (SMBHs) in the center of almost every galaxy. The famous M-sigma relationship, correlating the black hole mass with the stellar velocity dispersion of the host galaxy, hints that the SMBH regulates the evolution of the galaxy via some feedback mechanism. Wind-outflows in AGN is one of the key components of this feedback loop. I will avoid detailed aspects of the feedback and galaxy evolution and rather, focus on the wind itself. The multi-wavelength high resolution spectra of AGN show a diaspora of wind signatures as absorption lines, for example, the powerful ultrafast (~ 0.05 c) outflows and narrow warm absorbers in soft X-rays, the narrow absorption lines and the broad and fast (~ 0.2 c) absorption lines in ultraviolet and optical, the molecular outflows in infrared, etc. These different components of the winds in AGN carry mass and momentum away from the black hole and are significant contributors to the mass energy budget of the whole AGN system. To get a holistic picture of the AGN feedback mechanism, it is important to pay attention to the physics of these wind components – what are the physical mechanisms responsible for launching and accelerating the outflowing gas, are the different components different manifestations of the same outflow or different physical mechanisms are at play, is the mass energy budget of the wind components enough to account for the required feedback to maintain the galaxy evolution cycle, etc. etc. I shall also briefly discuss the accretion disk winds in stellar mass black holes – can we extract better understanding of disk winds in the "cleaner" X-ray binary black holes and then extend that knowledge to accretion disk winds in AGN. |