galactic nuclei
Lecturer: M. Sarzi

I will review the photometric and spectroscopic properties of galactic nuclei, with particular emphasis on recent results from a wide range of multi-wavelength campaigns carried out with space telescopes such as Chandra, Spitzer and HST or in the course of the ground-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey. From these tremendous achievements I will draw the latest picture on the growth or supermassive black holes and nuclear star formation, on the nature of AGN activity and on the co-evolution
of supermassive black-holes and their host galaxies.

1. Photometric Properties
- Surface Brightness Profiles
+ Core/Power-law nuclei (Classic Nuker results. Still a dichotomy?)
+ Exponential bulges (Classical vs Pseudo-Bulges, or simply central disks?)
- Photometrically disctinct components
+ Nuclear Stellar Disks (Discovery, Properties, Importance)
+ Nuclear Stellar Clusters (Discovery, Properties, Importance)
+ Point Sources (Optical and IR, AGN or unresolved extended sources?)
- Dusts, Inner Bars, Rings (What else? Unsharp-Masking gallery)

2. Spectroscopic Properties
- Classification, near ubiquity and Demography of AGN activit (Palomar survey, SDSS results)
- Interpretation of the Nuclear Classification (Sources of Gas Ionisation, Diagnostic Diagrams)
- LINERs (Importance, Real AGN or mixed-bags?)
- Fueling Problem, effect of Bars & Dusts (Angular momentum problem. Bar fuelling or simply stellar-mass loss?)

3. Supermassive Black Holes
- Detection, limits and methods
+ Our Galaxy: proper motions
+ Distant Galaxies: Water Masers, Stars, Gas.
- SMBH Demography
+ Mbh-sigma relation and alike, their importance
+ Completeness ("scary"-plot), Limits (HST), future perspetives (AO)
+ Example of an AO program, and target selection
- Influence of SMBH on their environment
+ Adiabatic Contraction, SMBHs binaries and loss cone

4. Stellar Populations
- Our Galactic Neighbourhood: complexity is the rule
- Distant Galaxies
+ results from imaging surveys (SSP models, color-color diagrams)
- Distant Galaxies
+ results from spectroscopic surveys (Line-strenght vs. Template superposition methods)
- SUNNS results, implications for Nuclear Disk, Clusters, AGNs