Astronomy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2746
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Item From Tantrums to Transformations: AGN Transients Discovered with the Zwicky Transient Facility(2021) Frederick, Sara; Gezari, Suvi; Astronomy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation work has consisted of searches for extreme AGN-related outbursts during Phase I of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey, which has been a ground-breaking wide-field instrument for the real-time detection and regular cadence monitoring of transients in the Northern Sky. Transients found to be nuclear through photometric filtering were vetted by humans and coordinated for prompt follow-up with various rapid robotic, spectroscopic, and high energy resources, to understand the nature of the galaxy centers undergoing flares and the appearance of spectral features. Findings from this unprecedentedly high-volume data stream were often serendipitous, and led to surprising new avenues for study, including 1) the establishment of a new observational class of quiescent galaxies caught turning into quasars, 2) the discovery of a preponderance of smooth and high-amplitude optical transients hosted in NLSy1s, and 3) a framework for distinguishing extreme AGN variability from other transients in AGN. We present the results of these observations, including candidates for TDEs in AGN, changing-look AGN caught "turning-on", as well as members of the new emerging observational class of flares in Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLSy1) galaxies associated with enhanced accretion (Trakhtenbrot et al. 2019). We compared the properties of these samples of flares to previously reported changing-look quasars and Seyfert galaxies, confirmed that they are a unique observational class of transients related to physical processes associated with the central supermassive black hole's accretion state, and considered the observations in the context of the physical interpretations for a range of related transients from the literature. With these unique sample sets, we also aim to understand why we have found certain galaxy types to preferentially host the sites of such rapid enhanced flaring activity, and attempt to map out the innermost environment of the accretion events. These pathfinding studies enabled with ZTF have the potential to guide how these exceptional moments of AGN evolution will be systematically discovered in future large area surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.Item MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS OF BLACK HOLE ACCRETION(2017) Avara, Mark James; Reynolds, Christopher S; McKinney, Jonathan; Astronomy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black holes embody one of the few, simple, solutions to the Einstein field equations that describe our modern understanding of gravitation. In isolation they are small, dark, and elusive. However, when a gas cloud or star wanders too close, they light up our universe in a way no other cosmic object can. The processes of magnetohydrodynamics which describe the accretion inflow and outflows of plasma around black holes are highly coupled and nonlinear and so require numerical experiments for elucidation. These processes are at the heart of astrophysics since black holes, once they somehow reach super-massive status, influence the evolution of the largest structures in the universe. It has been my goal, with the body of work comprising this thesis, to explore the ways in which the influence of black holes on their surroundings differs from the predictions of standard accretion models. I have especially focused on how magnetization of the greater black hole environment can impact accretion systems.Item Accretion onto Black Holes from Large Scales Regulated by Radiative Feedback(2012) Park, KwangHo; Ricotti, Massimo; Astronomy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis focuses on radiation-regulated gas accretion onto black holes (BHs) from galactic scales emphasizing the role of thermal and radiation pressure in limiting gas supply to the BH. Assuming quasi-spherical symmetry, we explore how the gas accretion depends on free parameters such as radiative efficiency, BH mass, ambient gas density/temperature, and the spectral index of the radiation. Our numerical simulations show an oscillatory behavior of the accretion rate, and thus the luminosity from the BH. We present a model for the feedback loop and provide analytical relationships for the average/maximum accretion rate and the period of the accretion bursts. The thermal structure inside the str sphere is a key factor for the regulation process, while with increasing ambient gas density and mass of BHs eventually the accretion rate becomes limited by radiation pressure. The period of the luminosity bursts is proportional to the average size of the ionized hot bubble, but we discover that there are two distinct modes of oscillations with very different duty cycles that are governed by different depletion processes of the gas inside the ionized bubble. We also study how angular momentum of the gas affects the accretion process. In the second part of the thesis, we study the growth rate and luminosity of BHs in motion with respect to their surrounding medium. Contrary to the case without radiation feedback, we find that the accretion rate increases with increasing BH velocity, v, reaching a maximum value at v ~ 20-30 km/s, before decreasing as v^{-3}. The increase of the accretion rate with v is produced by the formation of a D-type (density) ionization front (I-front) preceded by a standing bow-shock that reduces the downstream gas velocity to nearly sub-sonic values. Interestingly, there is a range of densities and velocities in which the dense shell downstream of the bow-shock is unstable; its central part is destroyed and reformed intermittingly, producing a periodic accretion rate with peak values about 10 times the mean. This effect can significantly increase the detectability of accreting intermediate mass BHs from the interstellar medium (ISM) in nearby galaxies. We find that the maximum accretion rate for a moving BH is larger than that of a stationary BH of the same mass, accreting from the same medium, if the medium temperature is T<10^4 K. This result could have an important impact on our understanding of the growth of seed BHs in the multi-phase medium of the first galaxies and for building and early X-ray background that may affect the formation of the first galaxies and the reionization process.