The angular size of the innermost regions of AGN are generally too small to be resolved, thus we must rely on indirect techniques to probe these regions. Reverberation mapping measures time lags between light curves of different wavelengths to estimate size scales. In the simplest picture for continuum reverberation, variable X-rays from close to the black hole irradiate an optically thick,...
I will present a summary of the results obtained in the past seven years by the Clemson-INAF Compton thick AGN project, which is based on the Palermo Swift-BAT catalog. By taking advantage of Swift-BAT effectiveness in detecting heavily obscured AGN at z~0, our group performed a multi-year, multi X-ray telescope effort aimed at obtaining a complete census of the obscured AGN population in the...
The formation and evolution of the first supermassive black holes have been put in the spotlight after the discovery of few hundreds extremely massive quasars at high redshift. An interesting twist in our understanding of the matter was introduced by the discovery of an unusual number of jetted sources: X-ray observations of blazars (i.e. AGN with jets aligned to our LoS) at $z>4$ prove that...
We present results from a high cadence multi-wavelength observational campaign of the enigmatic changing look AGN 1ES 1927+654 from May 2022- April 2024, coincident with an unprecedented radio flare ~60 times in a few months and the emergence of a spatially resolved jet at 0.1-0.3 pc scales. This is the first time in the history of astronomy that we discover a jet form and evolve in real time...
