Research Division Seminar
Looking for observational signatures of feedback from active galactic nuclei

Abstract

Feedback from accreting supermassive black holes (aka active galactic nuclei, AGN) is thought to be key in shaping the life-cycle of galaxies. AGN inject a significant amount of energy into the surrounding interstellar medium and launch gaseous winds. They are therefore able to potentially inhibit future star formation in their hosts. An ideal cosmic laboratory to study how AGN regulate galaxy growth is the so-called cosmic noon (z~2), i.e. the peak of AGN accretion activity, when their energy output is overall maximized. In this talk I will describe our recent efforts to systematically characterize the impact of AGN on star formation in galaxies at cosmic noon. To this aim, we are exploiting integral field spectroscopy data obtained with SINFONI and ALMA observations of the ionized and molecular gas as well as dust continuum. In addition, I will discuss a complementary avenue to build a statistical understanding of AGN feedback across the galaxy population by using spectroscopic surveys, less time consuming than integral field spectroscopy and able to collect large samples of thousands of targets.