Peter Boorman

From the calendar

One-hour talk

All large galaxies are expected to have a supermassive black hole (SMBH) lurking at their center. Most of the interstellar material that spirals in to feed these monsters is accreted behind thick clouds of gas and dust that obscure and conceal many electromagnetic signatures of the accretion flow. The abundance of accreting SMBHs hiding behind such dense material provides important insights into the region between interstellar space and the accretion disc, as well as the co-evolution between SMBHs and galaxies across cosmic time. However, a fundamental requirement that has proven difficult to date is to select the most obscured systems with approximately equal efficacy as the (often brighter) less-obscured population. In this talk, I will overview the strengths and weaknesses of observing at different wavelengths in the pursuit of increasingly complete samples of nearby accreting SMBHs. I will then present NuLANDS — a large legacy survey selected in the mid-to-far infrared, performed by NASA's NuSTAR X-ray space telescope in conjunction with numerous other X-ray observatories, aimed at constructing a less obscuration-biased census of active SMBHs in the local universe. I will conclude with prospects for the future, including a new selection of heavily obscured growing SMBHs identified via the detection of small-scale jets with radio observations.