News

August 21, 2023
Both of my ALMA proposals were accepted, for a total of about 35h. The proposals will focus on improving our understanding of the nuclear continuum emission in radio-quiet AGN.
July 31, 2023
This week I will be attending the SDSS-V collaboration meeting in New York.
July 22, 2023
I was awarded a China-Chile grant.
June 26, 2023
Giorgios Dimopoulos' first paper, focussed on high-resolution X-ray simulations of the Compton shoulder, has been submitted to MNRAS.
June 26, 2023
This week I am in Naples for The Restless Nature of AGN: 10 years later conference, where I will be giving an invited review talk on Changing-look AGN.
June 13, 2023
This week I am in Athens for the X-ray Universe 2023 meeting, where I will be giving a plenary invited talk on changing-look AGN. Alessia Tortosa and Kriti Gupta will also be giving talks in the AGN session, while Giorgios Dimopoulos will present a poster.
June 7, 2023
My latest paper, focussed on the discovery of a very tight correlation between nuclear (60-100mas) 100 GHz continuum and X-ray emission has been accepted for publication on ApJL and is now on ArXiv. This is the result of a dedicated ALMA campaign focussed on a volume limited sample of hard X-ray selected AGN.
June 5, 2023
Kriti Gupta is moving to Belgium for her first postdoc, she will work with Dominique Sleuse (U. Liege) and Maarten Baes (Ghent U.) on a joint position between these two universities. Good luck Kriti!
May 31, 2023
Kriti Gupta graduated! She is the first student to graduate from our PhD program. Congratulations Kriti!
April 30, 2023
After four years at UDP, Alessia Tortosa is moving to a new position at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma. Good luck Alessia!
March 30, 2023
Kristína Kallova just joined our group, she is starting a CATA-funded 4-year PhD.
March 15, 2023
I am in Japan this week working at Kyoto University, visiting the group of Prof. Ueda and working with Taiki Kawamuro and Satoshi Yamada.
February 26, 2023
Elena Shablovinskaya just joined our group at UDP for a 2-year Gemini-ANID postdoc. She will be working on the joint ALMA/X-ray monitoring campaign of the nearby unobscured AGN IC 4329A.
January 24, 2023
The paper I wrote with Stéphane Paltani on the importance of considering dusty media to carry out realistic X-ray simulations of the close environments of AGN has been accepted for publication in ApJ and is now on ArXiv. The paper comes with a new release of the ray-tracing code RefleX (version 3), and with the first X-ray dusty torus model (RXTorusD)
January 4, 2023
The results of the Fondecyt fellowships are out, and both people who applied to work with our group were awarded a 3-years postdoctoral fellowship. In next months both Yaherlyn Diaz and Arghajit Jana will join us at UDP.
December 20, 2022
I gave a colloquium at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn today.
December 13, 2022
This week I am in Leiden for the Torus 2022 workshop, where I will give an invited review talk about recent advancements on the circumnuclear environment of supermassive black holes from an X-ray perspective. Giorgios Dimopoulos is also attending and will give a talk about his work on the Compton shoulder.
December 12, 2022
Alessia's Tortosa's latest paper on Super-Eddington AGN has been accepted for publication and is now on ArXiv
December 1, 2022
I gave a remote invited talk at the SKIRT days workshop today.
November 28, 2022
I am in Puerto Varas for the 4th Chile-Japan Academic Forum, where I will give an invited talk about the close environments of accreting supermassive black holes.
November 11, 2022
The Nature Astronomy invited review I wrote with Benny Trakhtenbrot on Changing-look AGN is now on arXiv.
November 8, 2022
Giorgos Dimopoulos was awarded a grant from AHEAD 2020 to visit the University of Geneva next year.
November 5, 2022
Matthew Temple's paper, Swift-BAT AGN with changing-look optical spectra, has been accepted for publication in MNRAS.
October 15, 2022
Yaherlyn Diaz, who just graduated from the Universidad de Valparaiso, is joining my group on a short-term postdoc.
October 12, 2022
I gave an invited lecture on AGN at the VLTI High angular resolution Observations Workshop at ESO Santiago
September 1, 2022
I gave an invited talk at the NICER 2022 workshop.
August 29, 2022
My latest paper, The role of radiative feedback in the growth and obscuration properties of nearby supermassive black holes, has been accepted for publication in ApJ
August 3, 2022
Taiki Kawamuro's paper, Studying the Nuclear Mm-wave Continuum Emission of AGNs with ALMA at Scales, has been accepted for publication in ApJ
July 16, 2022
This week I will be attending the COSPAR meeting in Athens, where I will give an invited talk at the Twenty years of AGN discoveries with space observations: main results and perspectives on AGN in the high-energy sky, and a contributed talk at the Spectral/timing/polarimetry properties of AGN: theory and observations of the inner workings in these objects.
July 15, 2022
The second BASS data release has been published today in a special ApJS issue
July 10, 2022
Matthew Temple finally arrived Santiago to continue with his postdoctoral work at UDP.
June 28, 2022
I was awarded a Gemini-Chile grant to hire a postdoc for two years.
June 20, 2022
This week I am giving an invited review talk at the Ten years of High-Energy Universe in Focus: NuSTAR 2022 conference in Cagliari. Two other members of the team, Alessia Tortosa and Giorgos Dimopoulos, presented their work during the meeting.
June 13, 2022
This week I am giving an invited talk at the Black Hole accretion under the X-ray microscope conference in Madrid. Two other members of the team, Alessia Tortosa and Giorgos Dimopoulos, are presenting their work. The talks are available on YouTube.
June 1, 2022
I had the pleasure to give an invited colloquium (remotely) at the National Observatory of Athens.
May 17, 2022
Ruancun's first paper was accepted for publication on ApJ!
April 28, 2022
I gave an invited talk at the Second Chilean SDSS-V collaboration meeting.
April 7, 2022
Mike Koss and Benny Trakhtenbrot visited our group in Santiago for a week of BASS science.
April 1, 2022
Ryan Pfeifle graduated today, congrats Ryan! And good luck with your new position at NASA Goddard
February 1, 2022
Ryan Pfeifle was selected for the NASA Postdoctoral Position.
January 31, 2022
After a two-years postdoc in my group, Taiki Kawamuro moved to RIKEN, in Japan, where he will work as a Special Postdoctoral Researcher.
January 18, 2022
Giorgos Dimopoulos finally arrived Chile for his PhD, which he started remotely in March 2021.
December 31, 2021
Two people were awarded 3-years Fondecyt fellowships to work with my group. Matthew Temple will work with Roberto Assef and myself on LSST and BASS AGN, while Peter Boorman will work with me on obscured AGN in the nearby Universe.

December 9, 2021
Matthew Temple was awarded time with XMM-Newton to observe a few very interesting nearby BASS AGN (his very first X-ray proposal), congratulations!
November 2, 2021
Jeffrey McKaig's first paper, X-ray Simulations of Polar Gas in Accreting Supermassive Black Holes, has been accepted for publication on MNRAS.
October 27, 2021
Alessia Tortosa's paper, The extreme properties of the nearby hyper-Eddington accreting Active Galactic Nucleus in IRAS 04416+1215, has been accepted for publication on MNRAS.
October 14, 2021
I was awarded a ESO-Chile Comite Mixto grant to hire a postdoc for two years to work on AGN in the X-ray band.
September 22, 2021
Taiki Kawamuro's paper, Hard X-ray Irradiation Potentially Drives Negative AGN Feedback by Altering Molecular Gas Properties, has been accepted for publication on ApJS.
August 31, 2021
I have been promoted to Associate professor!
August 24, 2021
Jeffrey McKaig submitted his first paper, "X-ray Simulations of Polar Gas in Accreting Supermassive Black Holes", to MNRAS.
August 21, 2021
I had the pleasure of chatting with Frank Timmes about our X-ray monitoring campaign of 1ES1927 for the AAS Journal Author Series. Here is the video.
August 6, 2021
The ALMA proposals of Alejandra Rojas, Matthew Temple and Taiki Kawamuro have been accepted, congratulations! My 25h survey of a volume-limited sample of AGN was also accepted (priority A).
August 4, 2021
Our ALMA/X-ray monitoring campaign of IC4329A will start on Friday August 7, with the first Swift observation. Over the following 40 days (until Sept. 15) the source will be observed by Swift (10), XMM-Newton (10), NuSTAR (5) and NICER (20). ALMA will start the monitoring campaign on August 27.
July 15, 2021
Carolina Andonie (now PhD student at Durham University) submitted her first paper, A multiwavelength-motivated X-ray model for the Circinus Galaxy, to MNRAS. This work started during Carolina's bachelor thesis, and continued during her master.
July 9, 2021
My latest paper, A hard X-ray view of Luminous and Ultra-luminous Infrared Galaxies in GOALS: I – AGN obscuration along the merger sequence, has been accepted for publication on MNRAS.
July 2, 2021
Taiki Kawamuro's latest work was featured in a EAS press release during the EAS 2021 meeting. Here is the Spanish version of the press release.
July 2, 2021
Our symposium at the EAS 2021 meeting just concluded, with a typical attendance of 120-150 people during the two days.
June 10, 2021
The program of our symposium at the EAS meeting is now online
April 26, 2021
Both Alessia Tortosa and Taiki Kawamuro had their NuSTAR proposals accepted, congratulations! My proposal to monitor IC4329A was also accepted (100ks).
April 15, 2021
Alejandra Rojas is joining our group. She is starting today her Fondecyt fellowship, which will be carried out jointly between Universidad de Antofagasta (in the group of Mederic Boquien) and UDP.
March 16, 2021
A total of 180 abstracts were submitted to our EAS symposium The many faces of black hole accretion.
March 15, 2021
Kriti Gupta's first paper, BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey XXVII: Scattered X-Ray Radiation in Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei, has been accepted for publication on MNRAS!
February 11, 2021
Giorgos Dimopoulos (National Observatory of Athens, Greece) was awarded an ANID fellowship, and will start his PhD in our group in March.
February 9, 2021
The second paper based on the X-ray monitoring campaign of 1ES 1927, The 450 days X-ray monitoring of the changing-look AGN 1ES 1927+654, has been accepted for publication in ApJS.
February 5, 2021
Ryan Pfeifle's paper, BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey-XXIII. A New Mid-Infrared Diagnostic for Absorption in Active Galactic Nuclei, has been accepted for publication in ApJS.
January 2021
Registration for our EAS symposium The many faces of black hole accretion is now open
December 11, 2020
Several members of my group gave a talk at the Supermassive black holes: formation, evolution and growth online conference. Here you can find the Youtube videos of their talks:
- Kriti Gupta
- Jeffrey McKaig
- Matthew Temple
and here is my talk
November 29, 2020
Our proposal for a symposium during the next EAS meeting in Leiden (June/July 2021) has been accepted! "The many faces of black hole accretion" symposium will be held online on July 1-2. The idea of the symposium is to discuss the wealth of multi-wavelength data that has been collected over the past few years, and the prospects to advance our knowledge of AGN physics in the near future. We plan to discuss both observations and recent theoretical results during the meeting, with the goal of gathering the European AGN community, a year before JWST will begin to revolutionise our view of galaxy evolution, to discuss the state of our knowledge in nearby SMBHs, and to forge synergies among forthcoming facilities and JWST.
November 19, 2020
Kriti Gupta submitted her first first-author paper: BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey XXVII: Scattered X-Ray Radiation in Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei.
November 6, 2020
Taiki Kawamuro and Kriti Gupta gave a talk at the AGN Santiago group meeting
November 2, 2020
Matthew Temple joined our group as a postdoc. Matthew just finished his PhD at Cambridge University, and he will be working on several aspects of the AGN phenomenon, focussing on the relation between AGN outflows and galaxies. Matthew will start working remotely, we hope to welcome him soon in Santiago!
October 7, 2020
Taiki Kawamuro arrived Santiago to join our group as a Fondecyt postdoc. Taiki started his postdoc remotely in March from Japan, and he is working on combining submm and X-ray observations of AGN, in order to understand the influence accreting SMBHs have on their host galaxies.
July 16, 2020
The first paper on the X-ray campaign of 1ES1927+654 was published, together with a NASA press release.