Collaborative Research: NSF-BSF: A Multiwavelength View of Extreme Accretion onto Supermassive Black Holes

Modern sky surveys are discovering a range of rare and dramatic variable phenomena associated with the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of every galaxy. Deciphering these is crucial to advancing our understanding of how these black holes form and grow and how they interact with their host galaxies and beyond. The PI's team will carry out a systematic study of these extreme events combining infrared, optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray data from national observatories. This program will support graduate and undergraduate students and will equip them with expertise in high performance computing and statistics—required tools for analyzing the data from these big surveys. The team will translate their work to museum installations that make black holes and their environments accessible to a larger audience. Extreme transient events associated with supermassive black holes can be used as probes of accretion physics, black hole properties and growth, and their environments. This multiwavelength study will be able to determine the nature of these extreme accretion events, their emission mechanisms, and the dynamics governing their rates. The team will characterize the multiwavelength properties of transients in galaxy centers and compare them with existing models. Of particular focus will be mapping the full host-galaxy preferences for such events, including obscured population, and their connections to active galactic nuclei. The team will measure the late-time plateau emission of nuclear transients to constrain black hole masses, characterize newly accretion disks, and search for quasi-periodic flaring. Dust echos and high-ionization light echoes will be employed to reveal the environments around black holes in a statistical sample. This study addresses a crucial gap in our current knowledge of the behavior of active galactic nuclei and will reveal dynamical processes and the immediate environments of supermassive black holes in galactic centers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.