This month, I decided to write a blog post targeted at people outside of astronomy, to explain the reasoning behind one of the tools that we use. This is because I think the means and methods we have for exploring astrophysical phenomena are often as cool as the actual sources that we study, but often we don’t talk about how we go about discovering something. So, in this line, I’m starting simply, explaining the reasoning behind why we use a particular units system. Now, the title might be the first you’re hearing about this. And you might ask why we would ever, ever choose to measure the largest known things in the…

A year into my research and I’m slowly uncovering a lot about the zoo that populates objects under the title “Active Galactic Nuclei” (AGN). The fact that they are multi-wavelength emitters means that we get a variety of features to try and understand across different energy bands, but that also means that categories and sub-categories have become increasingly complex to describe them. The most straightforward standard model includes the central black hole, an accretion disk, a jet, an obscuring torus, and ionized clouds of gas near the black hole (broad/narrow line region; AGN model shown in Figure 1). Around the 1990s, a unification scheme for the numerous features of AGN…