Prof. Francisco Sanchez (The University of Memphis)

Studying AGN feedback under the microscope with Keck Adaptive Optics and JWST.

The discovery of several black hole scaling relationships has shown that supermassive black holes are not just astronomical ornaments sitting at the centers of galaxies, but they play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. In this talk, I will describe recent work showing how supermassive black holes influence their host galaxies. I will focus on our team’s recent results for a large sample of nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) observed with Adaptive Optics (AO) at the Keck Observatory (the KONA survey) and with JWST. Our sample contains AGN in isolated galaxies and AGN pairs. We find that AGN-driven outflows of ionized gas are ubiquitous in both, single and dual AGN, with mass outflow rates ranging from a few solar masses per year in Seyfert galaxies to ~100 solar masses per year in dual AGN. The observations provide direct evidence of the ways in which the AGN outflows interact with the interstellar medium (AGN feedback in action), either by creating cavities of molecular gas, or by launching molecular outflows, in both cases suppressing star formation.