Low-Ionisation Nuclear Emission-line Regions (LINERs) are the least luminous and the most numerous among the local population of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). They can be classified as type-1 or type-2 if their optical spectra show or do not show, respectively, a broad component. It is associated with the presence of a Broad Line Region (BLR) in these systems. However, recent studies have proven that the classification of type-1 LINERs may be controversial, since space- and ground-based spectroscopy provide contradicting results on the presence of very broad components (Cazzoli et al.2018). We have studied the nuclear spectra of 9 type-2 LINERs with intermediate spectral resolution HST/STIS data. We present the results on our analysis of the different spectral components, and discuss the eventual presence of BLR components in type-2 LINER galaxies, together with the possible presence of outflows, both in comparison with type-1 LINERs. We have found a BLR component in 7 out of the 9 analysed objects within the HST/STIS data.

We propose a role for CO ice mantles in ion recombination reactions, and demonstrate how the subsequent fall in the degree of gas phase ionization decreases the time required for cloud collapse under gravity by a factor of 5-6. Experimental results demonstrate that CO films prepared at cryo-temperatures spontaneously harbour electric fields immediately upon growth. Using what is known from observations about prestellar cloud conditions in the ISM, we explain how this phenomenon can lead to an acceleration in ion recombination reaction rates. The result is a pathway for cloud collapse to occur before cloud disruption by supernova remnants.

LLAGN are very important objects for studying as they are found in a large fraction of all massive galaxies. Nevertheless this topic needs more investigation as fraction of LLAGN in all AGN are much more higher than fraction of researches dedicated to LLAGN among all AGN studies. The goal of our work is checking out X-ray properties of LLAGN. For this purpose we created a sample of LLAGN by selecting most prominent LLAGN from literature and analyzed their X-ray spectral properties. As a result, we obtained 12 LLAGN and for 8 of them XMM X-ray observations are available. The spectra from one XMM camera, PN, were fitted with power law + absorption of neutral hydrogen. In the current report we present the previous results of this study. We plan to increase numbers of objects in our future studies.

Magnetic field plays an important role in star formation and galaxy evolution. Previous studies discussed about the origin of magnetic field and its effect to the environment. With the recent advancement of supercomputers, adding the magnetic field to a cosmological hydrodynamic simulations only become feasible. In this proceeding, we present the results of high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamic simulation with GIZMO and compare our simulation result with the previous literature and the observations.

I will present the result of two observational projects using ALMA to investigate the properties of the molecular gas in low-redshift (z ∼ 0.2) ultraviolet-luminous galaxies. These objects are extremely dense, highly star-forming and very metal-poor compared to other galaxies of similar stellar mass at the same redshifts, justifying their use as analogues to distant main-sequence galaxies in an attempt to understand the interplay between gas and star formation under similar conditions in the early universe. Firstly, we have observed the most metal-poor objects in our sample, in order to determine whether metallicity plays a role in CO emissivity of the molecular regions in these galaxies. Our four non-detections, with stringent upper limits, shows that CO is severely depleted, even under turbulent conditions. We have also observed one object with high spatial resolution, comparing data from CO emission and hydrogen recombination lines down to a resolution of ∼ 400 pc, allowing for a detailed analysis of the conversion of gas into new stars. We are able to compare star formation laws in individual clumps and the surrounding ISM, highlighting the difference between star formation efficiencies in each environment within the galaxy. Finally, the high-resolution data offers interesting insights on the growth of supermassive black holes in these galaxies: our combined multiwavelength data shows that there must be a low-mass (105 Mȯ) black hole in the center of the galaxy, while bolometric luminosity in the central region is dominated by star formation activity.

Dust Obscured Galaxies (DOGs) are observed as far as the reionization epoch. Their cosmic density peaks together with the star formation rate. DOGs also rule the star formation in high stellar mass galaxies. In this work we used a chemodynamical model to evolve the amount of dust in galaxies. We ran forty models varying initial mass and both dust formation efficiency and dust production. We find that for high star formation rate systems the accretion dominates the dust evolution and it explains high-z DOGs. Low star formation rate systems are better suited to investigate dust production. Also, we find that a MDust/MGas versus MDust/M* diagram is a good tracer of galaxy evolution.

Resolved galaxies in the local Universe are fundamentally connected to galaxies observed at all cosmic epochs. The IMF, extinction law, distance ladder, and stellar evolution are all anchored in observations of resolved stars in the nearby Universe. In this talk, I highlight new links between resolved galaxies and those in the higher redshift Universe, and discuss how future observations of resolved stars are essential for a complete and accurate census of galaxy evolution across cosmic time.

We investigate the stellar population of star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 4 by focusing on their slope of rest-frame ultraviolet continuum called UV spectral slope β. We analyze the sample of bright Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs) with Subaru/i′≤26.0in the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey field. Our detailed SED fitting analysis indicates that the LBGs with observed UV slope > −1.7, , Av > 1.0, and intrinsic UV slope < −2.5 are the intrinsically active star-forming galaxies with star formation rates larger than a few × 102 M⊙yr−1. A significant fraction of the UV-selected LBGs at z ∼ 4 is on-going active and dust obscured star-forming galaxies.

Radio interferometric maps of the blazar AO 0235+164 show the existence of a stationary core, and a compact jet composed of multiple receding components. In this work, we determined the structural characteristics of these jet components (core-component distance, position angle, flux density, etc.) using the statistical method for global optimization Cross-Entropy (CE). The images we analyzed were extracted from public databases, totaling 41 images at 15 GHz and 128 images at 43 GHz. Using criteria such as the value of the CE merit function, and mean residuals, we determined the optimum number of components in each map analyzed in this work. We found that jet components are distributed across all four quadrants on the plane of the sky, indicating a possible non-fixed jet orientation during the monitoring interval. The time evolution of the equatorial coordinates of the jet components were used to determine their respective speeds, ejection epochs, and mean position angles on the plane of the sky. We have identified more than 20 components in the jet of AO 0235+164, with their apparent speeds ranging roughly from 2c to 40c, and distributed across all four quadrants on the plane of the sky. From the kinematics of these jet components we could derive a lower limit of about 39 for its bulk jet Lorentz factor and an upper limit of approximately 42 degrees for its jet viewing angle.

We shall describe the various activities done by us in Covid Times including outreach and educational workshops in Physics and Astronomy. We shall discuss the caveats in virtual teaching of Astronomy and the lessons learnt in the process.

The VAMDC Consortium intended to find a way for users to cite the datasets accessed through the infrastructure. The Research Data Alliance Data citation working group provided the researchers and data centres communities with a recommendation to identify and cite dynamic data. This recommendation perfectly matched the VAMDC needs: the proposed solution relies on a query centric view and the set-up of a Query Store. Data should be stored in a versioned time-stamped manner and accessed through queries. The Query Store we implemented for VAMDC is interlinked with Zenodo. Since Zenodo is indexed in OpenAIRE and since the latter implements Scholix, VAMDC indirectly implements Scholix via its Query Store. The paper outlines the successes and limitations of the above approach.

We explore the intrinsic jet opening angle (IJOA) of blazars, from the literature, we found that the blazar number density peaks around 0.5° of IJOA and declines quickly with increasing IJOA for flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs), while the number density has double peaks around 0.3° and 2.0° of IJOA for BL Lacs. We assume that the black hole accretion-produced jet may have the smaller IJOA (for its larger linear scale of launch region), and the BH spin-produced jet may have the larger IJOA (for its smaller launch region), such that the FSRQs are accretion dominated for their single peaked small IJOA, while the BL Lacs are either accretion or BH spin dominated for their double peaked IJOA.

We present a detailed characterisation of physical properties of low-ionization nuclear emission-line regions (LINERs) and retired galaxies (RGs) in the local universe for redshift range 0 < z < 0.4 and two subranges z < 0.4 and 0.1 < z < 0.4. Furthermore, we test the effectiveness of WHAN diagnostic diagram in separating the two populations. We used photometric data, public spectroscopic data and morphological classification from SDSS-DR8, MPA-JHU SDSS-DR8 catalogue and Galaxy Zoo survey, respectively. We studied the distribution of LINERs, RGs and AGN-LINERs in relation to luminosity, stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), colour, and their location on the SFR-stellar mass and colour-stellar mass diagrams. We then studied the morphologies of both populations. Results have shown that for higher redshift range, AGN-LINERs have higher apparent g magnitude, SFRs and dominate on/above the main sequence (MS) of star formation compared to RGs. However, both populations have similar stellar mass and luminosity distributions at all redshift ranges hence suggesting a significant difference in terms of star formation of RGs and AGN-LINERs with redshift. However, larger and more complete samples of LINERs are needed from the future surveys (e.g., LSST) and missions (e.g., JWST) to study in more details the properties of RGs and AGN-LINERs and find alternative methods of separating the two populations, since using simply WHAN diagram from our study we do not find it to be effective for separating the two populations.

History, Maths and Astronomy are all mixed up in an innovative educational project that is being carried out in the Faculty of Education of the Universidad de La Laguna, in Spain. Students learn how to teach (to primary school students) about the shape of the Earth, the distances to the Moon, the Sun and other planets, collecting their own data with simple instrumentation and, most important, to connect ideas and different disciplines. The structure and contents of this project are presented, as well as examples of the activities that are carried out.

In dense interstellar clouds that are shielded from high-energy radiation (e.g., UV photons or cosmic rays), H-atom addition and abstraction reactions that take place on grain surfaces play principal roles in the synthesis or decomposition of complex organic molecules (COMs). These reactions are extensively investigated with laboratory experiments by bombarding astrophysical analogue ices with a beam of low-temperature H atoms. Here we demonstrate that, although 2-4 K solid para-H2 does not represent a typical environment of the surface of interstellar grains, para-H2 matrix isolation combined with IR spectroscopy is a complementary tool to sensitively detect astrochemical hydrogenation and dehydrogenation processes.

We present Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) Integral Field Unit (IFU), Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Very Large Array (VLA) observations of the inner kpc of the OH Megamaser galaxy IRAS 11506-3851. In this work we discuss the kinematics and excitation of the gas as well as its radio emission. The HST images reveal an isolated spiral galaxy and the combination with the GMOS-IFU flux distributions allowed us to identify a partial ring of star-forming regions surrounding the nucleus with a radius of ≍500 pc. The emission-line ratios and excitation map reveal that the region inside the ring present mixed/transition excitation between those of Starbursts and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), while regions along the ring are excited by Starbursts. We suggest that we are probing a buried or fading AGN that could be both exciting the gas and originating an outflow.

The recent detections of high-ionization nebular line emission from species including CIV in a number of z > 6 galaxies have highlighted substantial deficiencies in our understanding of metal poor stars. Prominent nebular CIV has never been detected in purely star-forming systems locally, and the massive star models used to model this emission in photoionization codes have not been empirically calibrated below the metallicity of the SMC (20% solar). As a result, we are presently entirely unprepared to correctly interpret nebular emission from metal-poor stars observed with JWST and ALMA in the reionization era. We present results from a multi-pronged ongoing local ultraviolet/optical observation campaign with HST/COS, Keck/ESI, and MMT designed to address this issue by locating and characterizing stellar populations capable of powering such high-ionization emission. This work has already demonstrated that strong nebular CIV can be powered by extremely metal-poor (< 10% solar) massive stars, indicating that we may already have evidence of such low-metallicity populations in the reionization era. However, CIV at the equivalent widths detected at z > 6 remains elusive locally, potentially in part due to the relative paucity of known nearby galaxies at these metallicities with massive stellar populations comparable to those in z > 6 systems. We present a new technique to locate such nearby galaxies, and results from optical follow-up which indicate that a substantial population of highly star- forming metal-poor galaxies likely resides just below the detection limits of previous large spectroscopic surveys.

Increasing observational evidence shows that a non-negligible fraction of the cosmic carbon is locked into macromolecules like Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). Interstellar PAHs live in extreme environments where there are processed by energetic photons (UV and X-rays) and by ions and electrons accelerated in hot shocked plasma and arising from cosmic rays. It is therefore important to quantify the capability of PAHs to survive under these extreme conditions and to determine the structural modifications induced by such energetic processing. I will present some novel results on this topic, focusing on the bombardment by ions and electrons in interstellar shocks. This work shows the importance of pairing an appropriate physical description of the interaction between target and projectiles with updated laboratory measurements of the relevant physical parameters. The results from physical modeling allowed to derive updated astronomical lifetimes for PAHs.