Colloqui di Fisica: Cosmic Lighthouses: the Realm of Luminous Quasars
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Lunedì 7 luglio 2025 alle ore 14:30, il prof. Enrico Piconcelli dell'Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma dell'INAF, terrà il Colloquio di Fisica dal titolo "Cosmic Lighthouses: the Realm of Luminous Quasars".
Quasars were discovered sixty years ago and the investigation of their physical and evolutionary properties still represents one of the most active fields in current extragalactic astrophysics. Quasars are among the most energetic objects in the Universe, and thanks to their prodigious luminosity have been detected up to Cosmic Dawn (< 1 Gyr after the Big Bang). Quasars also serve as exceptional laboratories for advancing our understanding of both the physical processes occurring near the inner accretion disk of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the coevolution of SMBHs with their host galaxies. The huge amount of energy released by these highly-accreting SMBH-powered sources has a lasting impact on the surrounding interstellar and circum-galactic medium by gas shocking, heating and expulsion. These interactions, the so-called “Quasar feedback”, are maximized in the most luminous quasars, and are believed to play a key role in shaping the evolution of the most massive galaxies and SMBHs. After an introduction on the multiple flavors of luminous quasars discovered by using different selection techniques, I will highlight the main results obtained over the last years using some of the major astronomical facilities.
