Speaker
Description
A fundamental question in our understanding of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is how they formed and how they subsequently impacted their hosts. Significant progress has been made in recent years, driven by remarkable spectral data from JWST, which provides extensive coverage of UV-optical emission lines in the high-redshift Universe (z>5). This provides crucial information about the physical properties of AGN and the ISM surrounding them.
One of the objectives of the First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES), a novel suite of hydrodynamical cosmological zoom simulations, is to explore these phenomena. The FLARES strategy allows us to simulate much larger effective volumes than possible with traditional periodic box methods, making it ideal to study the formation and evolution of AGN, and its impact on the host galaxy in the distant Universe.
In this talk I will present insights from FLARES, by first exploring predictions for the physical properties of SMBHs, and their hosts. I will also discuss the impact of SMBHs on their hosts using insights gained through matched simulations entirely without AGN feedback, or other modelling changes. Finally, I will introduce a new AGN emission model, combining disc, broad-line regions (BLR), narrow-line region (NLR), and torus components, incorporated into the open-source 'synthesizer' synthetic observations pipeline. When coupled with FLARES or other simulations, this allows us to predict the rest-frame X-ray to far-IR emission, including line emission. This enables us to make direct comparison with observational surveys, avoiding the need for complex and poorly motivated completeness corrections.
