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RADIO GALAXIES: 
resolving the AGN phenomenon

A focus meeting at the IAU General Assembly - Vienna
22-23 August 2018
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Twitter: @iau18radiogalax #iau18radiogalax
For conference inquiries please email: cricci@astro.puc.cl
The Meeting

Rationale

Radio galaxies provide us with natural laboratories for a wide range of (astro)physical processes. As they are the parent population of the whole class of beamed active galactic nuclei (AGN), understanding radio galaxies is vital for deriving a complete picture of accretion and emission throughout the Universe. Radio galaxies show us the most important aspects of AGN: the central engine with potential obscuration, the accretion process with its characteristic features, relativistic emission in the form of jets with knots and shocks, and radio lobes with occasional hot spots and visible interaction with the surrounding medium. The jets can give rise to important feedback between the AGN and the properties of the host galaxy, e.g. in terms of star formation. This makes radio galaxies unique sources to answer questions such as:

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• What triggers highly relativistic jets - and how are they launched?
• How are the jets so well collimated very close to the central engine
and how are they confined over a distance of, in some cases, several
100 kpc?
• How do radio galaxies emit VHE photons into the line of sight?
• Why is there no hot spot seen in some radio lobes?
• Are all radio galaxies obscured?
• Why are some AGN in the radiative mode while others are in the jet
mode?
• What are the intrinsic differences between low-excitation and highexcitation
radio galaxies and how do these relate to the FR-I/II
classification?
• What is the high-redshift luminosity function of radio galaxies and
how does it evolve to the present day Universe?
• How do radio galaxies interact with their environment and
participate in feedback?

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Program

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The program will consist of 5 sessions with each session presenting one invited review talk (20'+5') as well as contributed talks (15'), enabling us to cover the highlights of the research on radio galaxies and the road ahead. At the end of each session there will be room for a short (10’) discussion / quick brainstorming about the road ahead, i.e. what the next steps in the individual research areas will be. Significant research results that cannot be presented in oral contributions will be displayed in posters. In each of the 5 sessions we foresee a 6 minute time slot where 4 poster presenters will have the opportunity to advertise their work in a 90-seconds-one-slide presentation. Colleagues will be encouraged to include a photo of themselves on their poster, in order to facilitate contact and discussion. The event will be concluded by a round table discussion, led by the rapporteur Annalisa Celotti (SISSA/Italy), on the topic of “Future & Perspectives”, with a duration of ca. 45 minutes. The results of the discussions in the sessions and the final discussion will be noted. These notes will be used by an open working group to assemble a white paper on “Research perspectives on radio galaxies”. Depending on the outcome, this informal white paper may be incorporated into the IAU Focus Meetings report and submitted to arXiv.
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Confirmed invited speakers
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  • Session 1: Radio galaxy plasma and substructures
    Dan Schwartz (Harvard, USA): High-resolution X-ray observations of 100 kpc jets

     
  • Session 2:  The Central Engine and jet production
    Alexander Tchekhovskoy (Berkeley, USA):  Disks, jets, and other black hole-powered transients

     
  • Session 3: Radio galaxy populations and statistics
    Elaine Sadler (University of Sydney, Australia): Radio galaxy populations and their cosmic evolution

     
  • Session 4: Interaction with the environment
    Andy Fabian (IoA Cambridge, UK): AGN Feedback in Clusters of Galaxies 

     
  • Session 5: Future perspectives and directions
    Lindy Blackburn (Harvard, USA): The Event Horizon Telescope and beyond
 
 
Rapporteur: Annalisa Celotti (SISSA)
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Program

SOC and LOC

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SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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  • Volker Beckmann (chair, CNRS/IN2P3, France)
     
  • Diana Worrall (co-chair, Bristol Univ., UK)
     
  • Claudio Ricci (co-chair, UDP, Chile)
     
  • Loredana Bassani (IASF/INAF, Italy)
     
  • Chris Done (Durham, UK)
     
  • Anne Lähteenmäki (Aalto Univ., Finland)
     
  • Paolo Padovani (ESO, Germany)
     
  • Markus Böttcher (North-West Univ, South Africa)
     
  • Yoshihiro Ueda (Kyoto Univ., Japan)
     
  • Rodrigo Nemmen (Sao Paolo Univ., Brazil)
     
  • Sylvain Veilleux (Univ. of Maryland, USA)
     
  • Melanie Johnston-Hollitt (Victoria Univ., New Zealand)
     
  • Raffaella Morganti (ASTRON, Netherlands)


LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
 
  • Volker Beckmann
     
  • Claudio Ricci
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SOC and LOC
Two Days of Radio galaxies 

Radio galaxies provide excellent laboratories to probe physical aspects, unification, and the cosmic evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Thanks to recent multi-wavelength observations we are now able to separate many different physical components of radio galaxies through imaging and spectroscopy. Observations from the radio to the X-ray range can probe the ejection of matter into the jet and monitor decades of jet evolution. Gamma-ray observations have shown that radio galaxies are detectable up to the VHE range, despite unfavorable jet alignment. We observe radio galaxies out to redshifts larger than z=5, which makes them important cosmological probes. Planck maps have provided us with new insights into the populations of radio galaxies and their distributions in space in the 30-900 GHz range, NuSTAR provides high-quality spectra in the hard X-ray range, the EHT has begun mapping to the event horizon of the central black hole, and the SKA, E-ELT and other future telescopes will open up a new and vast discovery space. This meeting will bring together multiwavelength observers and theorists to synthesize progress made over the last three years and define future directions.

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Topics:

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  • Triggers of highly relativistic jets

  • Jet collimation

  • Radio galaxies as VHE photon emitters

  • Knots, hotspots and other structural features

  • The central engine

  • Radiative versus jet mode

  • Radio galaxy populations and statistics

  • Origin and evolution of radio galaxies

  • Interaction with the environment

  • Future telescopes' view on radio galaxies

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IAU General Assembly Focus meeting 3

22 August 2018
09:00 am
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