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JOINT DAUT-ICTP-OATS-SISSA COLLOQUIUM
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Speaker: Rachel Somerville (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy - Heidelberg)

Title: AGN feedback: Where, When, and How?

Date: Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Time: 16:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni

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Abstract:
It has become increasingly clear that 'standard' models of galaxy formation set within the hierarchical Cold Dark Matter paradigm fail to reproduce observed galaxy properties in several important ways. The energy released by accretion onto supermassive black holes in galaxies is a promising new ingredient that could solve many of these problems. I will discuss the physical mechanisms whereby AGN are thought to be able to couple with their surroundings, and assess the feasibility of this proposal from the standpoint of empirical energy constraints from observations. Then, I will present new observational results on the environment and redshift dependence of quenched galaxies (the "victims") -- as well as of the smoking guns (the AGN themselves), and compare these with predictions from semi-analytic models from several different groups.
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