CCA Colloquium: Norman Murray

Title: Continuum Driven Active Galactic Nuclei Winds

Abstract: It is often argued that accreting supermassive black holes can expel enough gas from their host galaxies to affect their star formation, a process called quasar-mode feedback. Evidence for this scenario is mixed. I will first review the relevant phenomenology, then the theory, before presenting new results from JWST that provide direct quantitative measures of the outflow rate from a very luminous quasar. The evidence comes from absorption features associated with the 3.4 micron aliphatic transitions associated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, a well known indicator of strong AGN activity