Event details

Date
December 14, 2026  – December 18, 2026
Location
Sport & Kurhotel at Bad Moos - Via Val Fiscalina 27, 39030, Sexten

Scientific Rationale

Understanding how supermassive black holes feed and return energy to their environments remains one of the central open problems in high-energy astrophysics and galaxy evolution. Although major progress has been achieved in recent years, the physical connection between accretion, multiphase condensation, and feedback is still fragmented across communities, methods, and scales. Observers often probe only isolated phases of the baryonic medium, while simulations still struggle to connect the black hole vicinity to the surrounding galactic, group, and cluster atmosphere in a self-consistent way. A unified framework is therefore timely and necessary.

The BlackHoleWeather program addresses this challenge by treating black hole feeding and feedback as a coupled, multi-scale, multiphase process, analogous to weather on cosmic scales. In this picture, hot halos, warm ionized gas, neutral gas, molecular filaments, dust, turbulence, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and mechanical outflows are not separate phenomena, but interconnected components of a self-regulated cycle. Cooling, condensation, chaotic and coherent accretion, and subsequent feedback must be understood together if we want to explain how black holes shape the thermodynamic evolution of galaxies and larger structures over cosmic time.

This effort is especially timely because observations and theory are now reaching a rare point of convergence. Facilities such as JWST, XRISM, ALMA, MUSE, MeerKAT, LOFAR, Chandra, and XMM-Newton are providing increasingly detailed constraints on the thermodynamic, kinematic, and multiphase properties of black hole environments. At the same time, state-of-the-art GPU simulations and synthetic pipelines are beginning to resolve the crucial bridge between microphysical accretion processes and macrophysical halo evolution. The outstanding challenge is no longer simply obtaining more data or more simulations, but integrating them into a coherent physical picture.

The first BlackHoleWeather workshop demonstrated the strong interest of the community in such an integrated approach and helped establish a focused network across theory, simulations, and observations. The scientific rationale for this second edition is to consolidate that momentum and move from broad conceptual discussion to a more coordinated and predictive framework. In particular, the workshop will focus on the links between halo condensation and inner accretion, on the relative role of different feedback channels from ultrafast outflows to jets, on the transport of energy via turbulent and multiphase media, and on direct comparisons between multiwavelength observations and numerical models.

By bringing together a selected group of experts across these domains, the workshop aims to clarify the key physical questions, define common benchmarks and diagnostics, and stimulate coordinated future efforts in simulations, synthetics, and observing programs. The broader goal is to accelerate progress toward a predictive, multi-scale theory of black hole feeding and feedback that can be tested quantitatively across galaxies, groups, and clusters.

Organizers

Prof. Massimo Gaspari (U. Modena) – Chair
Dr. Paolo Tozzi (INAF-Arcetri)
Dr. Fabrizio Fiore (INAF-OATS)

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Payment details

Registration Fee
The €350 fee will be paid on site. A limited number of waivers for participants requiring critical financial support (covered by the ERC grant) may be requested in advance by emailing Prof. Gaspari.
Workshop code for bus and payment
BHW26