Supermassive black holes and their surroundings: MeV signatures

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of the MeV energy range in understanding supermassive black holes, highlighting unresolved questions about their emission mechanisms and surroundings, and proposing that this window is crucial for future insights.

Contribution

It reviews key open questions about SMBH environments and advocates for focused exploration of the MeV energy window to uncover new physical insights.

Findings

MeV signatures are crucial for understanding SMBH emission processes.

The MeV window can shed light on the origin of high-energy neutrinos.

Exploration of the MeV range can clarify the nature of Fermi bubbles and blazars.

Abstract

The gravitational potential of supermassive black holes is so powerful that it triggers some of the most intense phenomena in the Universe. Accretion onto these objects and relativistic jet emission from their vicinity are observable across a wide range of frequencies and throughout cosmic history. However, despite this wealth of data, many aspects of their underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Investigating this phenomena across all frequencies is crucial, yet some energy windows are still poorly explored. One such window is the MeV energy range: many key signatures related to the emission from the SMBH environment - both in quiescent and active phases - are expected to lie between one and several hundreds MeV. In this work, we explore some of the open questions regarding the behavior and emission processes in the surroundings of SMBHs, and how these questions might be approached. From the elusive nature of Fermi bubbles around our Galactic Centre, to the origin of high-energy neutrinos in the nuclei and jets of Active Galactic Nuclei, to the nature and emission mechanisms of the most powerful blazars, the MeV window stands out as a crucial key to understanding SMBH physics.