Project Title: Supermassive Black Holes: Life on the Edge

Project Advisor: Paul J. Green

Background: Quasars are extremely luminous galaxies whose cores are inhabited by supermassive blackholes accreting matter from the surrounding environment. The birth, growth and feeding of these black holes is tied into structure, galaxy, and star formation in the Universe. X-ray images are by far the most complete and efficient way to find quasars, and the Chandra Observatory is the most sensitive X-ray telescope ever, with the best spatial resolution, allowing quasar detection to high redshifts, and facilitating unambiguous counterpart identification in other wavebands.

Scientific Questions: When did black holes first form? How long do they live? Do active quasars cluster with galaxies, indicating environmentally-triggered feeding?

Scientific Methodology: Now that our large X-ray and optical imaging survey is complete, we are emphasizing deep followup optical spectroscopy of serendipitous Chandra sources at large telescope. The faint objects which may be adolescent dust-obscured and/or nascent high redshift quasars. Simulations and detailed completeness estimates will be performed to allow for space density and luminosity function calculations out to high redshift. We seek also to characterize these objects and compare them to the more obvious optically-selected quasars. We are particularly interested in X-ray pairs and extended objects, which may be lensed quasars, binary interacting AGN, or perhaps distant X-ray jets. We will use clustering analysis to test the interaction paradigm.

Other links related to this project

• ChaMP public page
• Chandra X-ray Observatory