CORDIS - Resultados de investigaciones de la UE
CORDIS

Galactic Outflows and Feedback in the Astro-H eR

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GOFAR (Galactic Outflows and Feedback in the Astro-H eR)

Período documentado: 2016-11-01 hasta 2017-10-31

We have studied winds emanating from galaxies with supermassive black holes in their center.
We advanced the understanding of the launch mechanism of these winds, where they are in their host galaxy, and what impact they may have on galactic evolution.
The conclusions of our research is that these winds are relatively far away from the black hole, which also means they are massive and could impact the host galaxy.

Astrophysical research is the most fundamental research that has no direct bearing on society.
Indirectly, space research (our main tools are on board satellites) promotes space technology that in turn serves society.
The overall objective of astrophysics is to understand of the universe, and in the context of GOFAR to understand the physics around black holes, and the mechanisms that drive galactic winds.
We have contributed to this understanding.
The hardware projects started with the NASA collaboration and continued at the Technion allowed us to build an instrument that would be launched to space soon and will provide further data on the energetic properties of X-ray and gamma-ray sources. This initiative and project is new to Israel and to Europe and is a direct result of the GOFAR project.
This research will be exploited by the Israeli Space Agency who will fund our ongoing efforts to build detectors for space. GOFAR contributed to this effort both through its research results, but also via the connections and management training the PI obtained while working in the U.S.
Further dissemination is our public outreach through the public talks, the international meetings, and the advanced graduate courses taught as a result of GOFAR.
We have been analyzing X-ray satellite observations of active galaxies.
X-ray observations of AGN outflows were studied through spectroscopic observations with ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite.
We carried out a large observing campaign of the active galaxy (AGN) NGC 7469 that included several X-ray satellites as well as ground-based optical and radio monitoring.
We analysed the thermal instability in a well known active galaxy NGC 3783.
We measured for the first time the accretion-disk corona in a high-redshift quasar.

We also used radio telescopes and mm wave observations to detect variability possibly arising from galactic outflows, or from magnetic activity above the accretion disk corona.
We showed that the magneto-hydrodynamic model that could explain black hole winds from centers of galaxies can also work on smaller, stellar scales.

We detected the wind velocities as well as emission from the starburst ring. A failed nuclear wind was discovered in another active galaxy.
We identified both cold and hot gas emitting X-rays in a radio galaxy 3C 390.3 and reported on the variability of another AGN NGC 5548.
We found evidence in grating spectra for the sub-relativistic outflows

We detected for the first time day-scale variability in the mm-band and used polarization measurements to revise a black hole mass estimate.
We found convincing evidence that the common extinction feature at 217.5 nm is associated with giant PAH molecules.


There is no obvious socio-economic impact to these results.
Illustration of wind blowing from accretion disk. Credit: K.Fukumura using BINSIM visualization