Cosmology with Quasars
Submitted by chandra on Mon, 2019-01-28 08:40
Guido Risaliti
We are pleased to welcome Guido Risaliti as our guest blogger. Guido is the first author of a paper that is the subject of our latest press release. He is an astrophysicist whose main research field is the study of giant black holes in the center of galaxies. He got a Ph.D. from the University of Florence, Italy, in 2002. He then worked as a researcher at INAF - Arcetri Observatory from 2002 until 2015, and was a Research Associate at the Center for Astrophysics / Harvard and Smithsonian from 2002 to 2014. Since 2015, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Florence.
For about 20 years I have studied the emission of quasars, the most luminous persistent sources in the Universe, powered by an “accretion disk” made of gas spiraling into a giant black hole. Quasars emit most of their radiation in the optical/ultraviolet (UV) band, through their accretion disk, and a small fraction in the X-rays, produced by a cloud of hot electrons called a “corona”. This corona needs a continuous flow of energy from the disk in order not to cool down and stop producing X-rays.
We do not know much about this energy exchange: a self-consistent model linking these two components has not been found yet. However, we have observed an interesting relation: the X-ray fraction of the total emission of radiation by quasars decreases with its luminosity. For example, if observing two quasars, we find that the first one is ten times more UV luminous than the second one, it will be only four times more luminous in X-rays.