The close environments of accreting massive black holes are shaped by radiative feedback

Understand

The large majority of the accreting supermassive black holes in the Universe are obscured by large columns of gas and dust.

• The location and evolution of this obscuring material have been the subject of intense research in the past decades, and are still highly debated.
• A decrease in the covering factor of the circumnuclear material with increasing accretion rates has been found by studies carried out across the electromagnetic spectrum.
• The origin of this trend has been suggested to be driven either by the increase in the inner radius of the obscuring material with incident luminosity due to the sublimation of dust; by the gravitational potential of the black hole; by radiative feedback; or by the interplay between outflows and inflows.