Papers and research news from George Privon
26 April 2026 I have not had the chance to post individual news blurbs for these, but I have been involved in several papers that have come out over the past few months. In chronological order they are: “ Radio-Near Infrared Imaging of Dual Active Galactic Nuclei Candidates ” (Johnstone+). Published in The Astrophysical Journal. “ Constraining Nuclear Molecular Gas Content with High-resolution CO…
4 December 2025 Mergers of gas-rich galaxies result in rapid formation of new stars and growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The prevailing paradigm for galaxy formation includes feedback from growing SMBHS (i.e., active galactic nuclei or AGN) as a key ingredient in explaining the colors and stellar masses of the galaxies we see in the Universe around us. Galaxy mergers are also the likely…
22 September 2025 Galaxies undergo many processes over the lifetime of the Universe, but one of the more striking events can be the “quenching”, or halting of star formation. Quenching can happen for a variety of reasons, but observations of low-mass (dwarf) galaxies suggest that most dwarf galaxies are forming stars unless they are close to a much larger galaxy (or galaxy group or cluster). In “…
19 July 2025 A few papers I am involved with have recently been accepted for publication: ALMA polarimetry of radio-quiet AGNs (Shablovinskaia+) Shockingly Effective: Cluster Winds as Engines of Feedback in Starburst Galaxy VV 114 (Kader+) High-Resolution Optical IFU Spectroscopy of the Complex Galaxy Merger II Zw 096 (Riesco+) ALMA discovery of Punctum – a highly polarized mm source in nuclear…
4 June 2025 Understanding the growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is an important aspect of understanding how the galaxies they live in grow and change over the lifetime of the Universe. Recent work on the general population of actively growing SMBHs (i.e., the active galactic nuclei or AGN) has found at the statistical relationship between the amount of gas obscuring our view towards the…
26 April 2025 A major, persistent question about galaxies, particularly infrared-bright galaxies, is: does star formation or supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth dominate the luminosity? This can be a difficult question to answer as the gas and dust that fuels both types of activity can also obscure our view of what is happening in the centers. In practice, this means that trying to address this…
22 April 2025 Compton-thick active galactic nuclei (CT AGN) are growing supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that are obscured by a significant amount of gas and dust that blocks optical and ultraviolet light, as well as low-energy X-rays. Compact obscured nuclei (CONs) are energetic regions at the centers of some galaxies that are also hidden behind large amounts of gas and dust; however, in CONs we…
20 April 2025 I have just released v0.3.0 of proposal_database , a personal tool to track observing and funding proposals. This tool stores and updates basic proposal metadata (e.g., title, submitting organization, status/outcome, PI, Co-Is, proposal code) is stored in a SQLite database and runs some simple queries against the database. This tool is intended to make it easy to ask questions such…
25 March 2025 Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) are astrophysically interesting (small) dust grains that emit a significant amount of energy in the near and mid-infrared. The James Webb Space Telescope can observe PAH features using its integral field units (IFUs), but these can only observe small regions of the sky at a time. In “ A Spectroscopically Calibrated Prescription for Extracting…
13 December 2024 Star formation has long been known to be associated with molecular gas, with higher (surface) densities of molecular gas generally correlating with higher (surface) densities of star formation. Galaxy interactions and mergers are known to have globally enhanced star formation but it has been a matter of debate if star formation and molecular gas are correlated in the same way as…