Far-infrared emission from AGN and why this changes everything?

When:  Thursday, 14^th February 2019

Where:  Robert Hooke Seminar Room

Speaker: Dr Myrto Symeonidis 

Hosted by:  Beatriz Mingo

Abstract

AFar-infrared radiation is thought to originate from dust heated by stars. And rightly so. After all this is exactly what has been observed for decades when studying star-forming galaxies. However, it is slowly becoming apparent that these assumptions are not valid when powerful AGN are in the picture. We have recently discovered that powerful AGN are strong far-IR emitters and if also optically-unobscured, their emission dominates over that from stars at all wavelengths from the X-rays to the submm. The likely origin of the far-IR/submm emission is dust at kpc-scales in the AGN ionisation cone, directly heated by the AGN. I will present these results and highlight their implications on a whole suite of observational results from SFR measurements to the shape of the infrared galaxy luminosity function.