Welcome

Massive black holes, typically weighing millions of solar masses and above, inhabit the centers of today’s galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Most of today’s massive black holes weigh about a thousandth of the host stellar mass. Massive black holes also powered quasars known to exist just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Owing to observational breakthroughs and remarkable advancements in theoretical models, we do know that massive black holes exist and have co-evolved with their hosts, but we do not know how they got there nor how, and when, the remarkable connection between massive black holes and host galaxies was established.

Feedback from active galactic nuclei powered by massive black holes is expected to be a key ingredient for quenching cooling and/or star formation and reconciling theoretical models with the observed numbers of star forming galaxies. The same feedback, however, regulates gas inflows towards the massive black hole, establishing a feeding/feedback cycle, and can locally triger star formation. Over cosmic history, the interaction between black hole growth, star formation, and feedback from stars and supernovae and from the central massive black hole has evolved as galaxies matured and their gas content decreased.

Massive black holes are studied by observations of emission lines, infrared continua, radio jets, X-rays and gravitational lensing. Current and forthcoming facilities at wavelengths spanning from radio to X-ray and beyond (e.g., ALMA, LOFAR, Euclid, JWST, HST, VLT, Chandra, XMM, eRosita, Swift, Fermi, CTA) widen and deepen our view of the Universe, while, from the theoretical point of view, analytical models and numerical simulations becoming more sophisticated and realistic.

In this conference we will bring together theorists and observers in order to advance our understanding of how massive black holes grow in galaxies, and affect their surroundings, both for the first galaxies emerging from the dark ages and in local galaxies and clusters.