Attività del Dipartimento

Not so close to the event horizon: latest results on circumnuclear matter in supermassive black holes

Andrea Marinucci

The circumnuclear medium of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is a very complex environment, where several physical components (a corona of hot electrons, an accretion disk, a dusty ”torus”) are responsible of much of the observed properties in the X-rays. These regions extend from very close to the event horizon up to thousands of gravitational radii from the central supermassive black hole. I will review the observational progresses on some of the physical parameters of such structures obtained using NASA and ESA observatories (NuSTAR, Chandra and XMM-Newton) and discuss future prospects for constraining their geometries, in view of the launch in 2021 of the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE).