Unveiling and weighting Super Massive Black Holes at cosmological distances

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Marcella Brusa
• Subject Area: Astrophysics and Astronomy
• Term: from 2009 to 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 127077797

• Final Report Year: 2012

Final Report Abstract

Understanding how galaxies formed and how they became the complex systems we observe in the local Universe is one of the outstanding problems of modern astronomy, mainly pursued using large and deep multi-wavelength surveys. A full picture of galaxy evolution requires a good knowledge of how their active nuclei (AGN) evolve through cosmic time, given the observed tight scaling relations between black holes and host galaxies in the local Universe. Here we report on a study of the evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBH) within a survey field which is among the best studied across the entire electromagnetic spectrum: the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). We obtained for the first time a well defined sample of heavily obscured and Compton Thick AGN from a X-ray spectral analysis in the CDFS, using the deepest X-ray observations ever performed. Thanks to the unique and comprehensive multiwavelength dataset available in the CDFS, most notably Herschel observations, we investigated the properties of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of heavily obscured AGN and their evolution with redshift, as well as with properties of their host galaxies, such as stellar masses, star-formation rate, and morphology.

Publications

• (2011). The XMM Deep survey in the CDF-S-I. First results on heavily obscured AGN. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 526, L9
  Comastri, A.,... Brusa, M., ... Balestra, I., et al.