Dusan Tubin

Research Interests:

I started studying active galactic nuclei (AGN) during my bachelor's degree at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Throughout my master's, I published my first first-author scientific publication, where we analyzed the optical/near-IR VLT/MUSE data of the particularly "happy" dual AGN, Mrk 739 (see image below).
I have always been interested in the field of galaxy evolution and the astrophysics behind AGN activity, pairs of supermassive black holes, star formation, and galaxy mergers. Now during my Ph.D., I have the chance to keep studying and searching for these fascinating and elusive supermassive black hole pairs!

• Mrk 739: Mrk 739 is a nearby dual AGN galaxy whose projected nuclear separation is ~ 3.4 kpc. We analyzed the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) data. We found that the galaxy has an extended AGN-ionized emission-line region while star-forming regions are close to the nuclei. The morphology and dynamics of the dual AGN Mrk 739 are consistent with an early stage of the collision, where the foreground galaxy (Mrk 739W) is a young star-forming galaxy in an ongoing first passage with its background companion (Mrk 739E). Link to the publication: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/abedba

• The eROSITA upper limit server: Currently, I am leading the implementation of the eROSITA upper limit server, which will be a platform where users can retrieve X-ray flux upper limits and photometric products from the eROSITA observations that belong to the German consortium.

• Searching supermassive black hole binaries: My Ph.D. project consists of searching for the presence of pairs of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies with sub-pc separation using X-ray observations from eROSITA, NICER, Swift, and XMM-Newton missions.