Piercing the dusty environment of merging supermassive black holes

It is a posit of modern astrophysics that most galaxies host a super-massive black hole (millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun). These black holes affect the evolution of galaxies well beyond their gravitational sphere of influence (which does not extend wider than 1/1000th of a typical galaxy linear size). In turn, the evolution of galaxies affects the growth of black holes through, e.g., galaxy merging. Interacting galaxies, or galaxies with a multiple (active) nuclei are key laboratories to investigate these processes. While the extragalactic astrophysical community share a broad consensus on each of the above statements taken individually, how these feed-back loops work in the Universe, and the relative importance of various feed-back channels remain largely not understood. Furthermore, the existing samples of dual/binary/multiple active galaxies are remarkably scarce and incomplete. My talk will offer a glimpse of the recent efforts that a group of scientists in the MAGNA ("Multiple AGN Activity"; "Eat" in Roman dialect) collaboration have been undertaking to acquire large observational samples of dual/binary AGN, and to use them to inform the cosmological and "local" simulations aiming at predicting the concurrent galaxy/black hole evolution. This talk will allow you to pierce your (X-ray) view through the dusty environment of these systems. &nbsp