NEW OPENING FOR A SEVERO OCHOA PHD POSITION: Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology. Multiface outflows in LINERs connecting supermassive black holes and their host galaxies

Supervisor: Isabel Márquez (isabel@iaa.es)

IAA-CSIC offers a predoc contract in the framework of the Project “Severo Ochoa”. Candidates are expected to carry out their activity in the field of galaxy evolution and cosmology.
The connection between SMBH and their host galaxies is an active field with implications in galaxy evolution. The galactic physical state, including eventual interactions with neighbors, may have an influence on AGN fueling, and hence on the growth of black holes. Conversely, outflows, produced by Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) and intense episodes of star-formation (SF), may play a crucial role in regulating (feedback) the stellar mass and SMBH mass growth. In the last decade, the different gas phases of outflows have been widely studied, mostly via observations of long-slit spectroscopy and Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS). Works aimed to study outflows and feedback in local starbursts and luminous AGNs (e.g. Seyferts galaxies) clearly demonstrate the power of the 3D IFS in these studies.
In our group we focus on a special type of low-luminosity AGNs, LINERS (Low Ionization Nuclear Emission-line Regions, Heckman 1980), with a multiwavelength perspective, from X-rays to radio frequencies. LINERs may represent the most numerous type of AGNs in the local Universe. Since they do not generally harbor important SF activity, the interpretation is easier as starbursts provide competing outflow driving mechanisms. Except for individual discoveries, the only systematic studies based on optical long-slit spectroscopy are those by our group. Among the explored LINER population (30 sources), multi-phase outflows seem to be common (60%) in type-1 LINERs. Most of these outflows, spectroscopically identified, show in their HST Hα image a large-scale biconical or bubble-like shape along with evident spatially resolved sub-structures as gas clumps of sizes from 20 to 70 pc.
In our team we are using proprietary data from MEGARA together with those from MEGADES, to make a 3D description of multiphase outflows in LINERs, to spatially map and disentangle the gas ionization state and the kinematics of the ionized gas and stellar content. Since this study covers a handful of objects, we are producing an atlas of LINER candidate to host extended ionized-gas emission with high resolution, narrow-band Hα imaging from proprietary ALFOSC@NOT and archival HST, which will virtually double current samples; outflow candidates will be target of 3D spectroscopy to be gathered in the future. Both approaches constitute the core of the a PhD thesis in our group, to be defended in 2022.