NRAO/Socorro Colloquium Series:

Meg Urry

Yale


Hidden Black Holes in the Young Universe


Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are signposts for actively accreting supermassive black holes. AGN are common in the early Universe (z~2-3) but may be undercounted by factors of 3-10 because obscuration by gas and dust prevents their inclusion in UV-excess or optical surveys. With the unprecedented combination of the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope, there is now a unique opportunity to find obscured AGN at the epoch of peak black hole accretion and peak star formation. The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) project, conceived 5 years ago as the deepest multiwavelength probe to date and designed to find obscured AGN at z~2-3, suggests there can be a substantial population of obscured AGN which are missed at least in part because of selection biases. In fact, a fixed ratio of obscured to unobscured AGN is consistent with the redshift distribution in deep X-ray surveys, the infrared number counts of X-ray sources, the apparent decrease in obscured AGN at high redshift, and the integrated X-ray background; however, very recent results suggest the degree of obscuration may depend on luminosity. Thus these multiwavelength data constrain the geometry and evolution of structure in AGN.






Friday, 6 May 2005
11:00am

Array Operations Center Auditorium

Local Host: Jim Ulvestad