Dominika Król (Harvard Smithonian CfA)
One of the crucial parameters characterizing the interstellar medium (ISM) is its metallicity, which is associated with the chemical evolution of a galaxy’s stellar populations. However, stellar feedback is only part of the story. The extent to which active galactic nuclei (AGN) influence the chemical evolution of their hosts remains an open question. In my talk, I will present spatially resolved metallicity (log(O/H)) maps for Mrk 573, a Compton-thick AGN. By applying theoretical metallicity diagnostics tailored to AGN-driven emission to Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data, we probe the metallicity out to ~1 kpc scales, with tens-of-parsecs resolution across the ionization bicone. We find significant metallicity enhancement in AGN-dominated regions, with oxygen abundances reaching up to ~3xSolar, strongly correlated with the Seyfert/LINER Index, defined as the distance of a point from the Seyfert/LINER division line in the S-BPT diagram. Metallicity enrichment traces trace the VLA 6~cm jet/radio lobe emission. This, together with the lack of evidence for star formation in the bi-cone region, suggests that the enrichment originates from metals transported from the nuclear AGN region by winds, outflows, or jets. I will discuss the possible sources and implications of this metal enrichment.
Martin Solar (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Core-collapse supernovae are very energetic explosions that have a significant impact in the interstellar medium within galaxies. However, it is not well understood how progenitors of core-collapse supernovae form, evolve, and explode. In this talk, I plan to constrain the core-collapse supernova progenitor properties studying their star formation efficiency (or molecular gas depletion time) environments. In summary, it is found that interacting massive binaries occur in regions of intense, efficient star formation rather than simply higher gas content.
Biswaraj Palit (NCAC, Warsaw)
Kamil Bicz (University of Wrocław)
Przemysław Mróz (Astronomical Observatory, Warsaw University)
Maciek Wielgus (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, IAA-CSIC, Granada, Hiszpania)
Patrick C. Fragile (Charleston College)
Accretion of gas onto black holes is one of the most important processes shaping our Universe. Understanding extremely high rates of accretion (dubbed `super-Eddington') is vital to explaining the challenging observation that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are fully formed at redshifts >7. It is also important to understanding astrophysical objects such as tidal disruption events (TDEs) and ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs). While we are able to perform observations of super-Eddington accreting systems, to understand them more fully, we must turn to numerical studies. In this talk, I will present the results of some recent super-Eddington disk simulations and discuss some of the interesting things we are learning.
Samik Mitra (Astrophysics and Relativity Group International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru, India)
