Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxy Morphology

Abstract

This review addresses one of the important topics of current astrophysical research, namely the role that supermassive black holes play in shaping the morphology of their host galaxies. There is increasing evidence for the presence of massive black holes at the centers of all galaxies and many efforts are directed at understanding the processes that lead to their formation, the duty cycle for the active phase and the question of the fueling mechanism. Related issues are the epoch of formation of the supermassive black holes, their time evolution and growth and the role they play in the early ionization of the Universe. Considerable observational and theoretical work has been carried out in this field over the last few years and I review some of the recent key areas of progress.

Invited Review, to appear in Proceedings "Towards a New Millennium in Galaxy Morphology" ed . D.L.Block,I.Puerari,A.Stockton & D.Ferreira (Kluwer:Dordrecht), 25 pages,8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• WFPC2 Images of the Central Regions of Early-Type Galaxies - I. The Data
• Spin, Accretion and the Cosmological Growth of Supermassive Black Holes
• Gravitational Waves from Gravitational Collapse
• Peering through the dust: Evidence for a supermassive Black Hole at the nucleus of Centaurus A from VLT IR spectroscopy
• The HST view of LINERs nuclei: evidence for a dual population?
• Binary black holes and tori in AGN I. Ejection of stars and merging of the binary
• Collapse of a Rotating Supermassive Star to a Supermassive Black Hole: Post-Newtonian Simulations
• A new sample of large angular size radio galaxies. III. Statistics and evolution of the grown population
• On The Parent Population of Radio Galaxies and the FRI - FRII Dichotomy
• Black Holes, Mergers, and the Entropy Budget of the Universe