11 February: Carolin Villforth

Speaker: Carolin Villforth (University of Bath)

Date: Wednesday 11 February 2026

Time: 15:00

Location: Physics 3.21 Berry

How to feed an Active Galactic Nucleus

The discovery that supermassive black holes reside in the centres of most if not all massive galaxies has emphasised the importance of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in galaxy evolution. Despite this, the processes that trigger Active Galactic Nuclei remain poorly understood. While low luminosity AGN require fuel supplies low enough to allow fuelling through so-called secular processes, the gas masses required to power luminous AGN are so large that fuelling them is challenging. Identifying the fuelling mechanisms for AGN is also challenging since AGN vary on much shorter timescales than most galaxy wide processes. I will present results from different studies analyzing the contribution of merger triggering to the AGN population as a function of both luminosity and redshift and star forming properties. I will also show how machine learning to help in the detection of mergers in large samples.