Quasars at All Cosmic Epochs

The last 50 years have seen a tremendous progress in the research on quasars. From a time when quasars were unforeseen oddities, we have come to a view that considers quasars as active galactic nuclei, with nuclear activity a coming-of-age experienced by most or all galaxies in their evolution. We have passed from a few tens of known quasars of the early 1970s to the 500,000 listed in the catalogue of the Data Release 14 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Not surprisingly, accretion processes on the central black holes in the nuclei of galaxies — the key concept in our understanding of quasars and active nuclei in general — have gained an outstanding status in present-day astrophysics. Accretion produces a rich spectrum of phenomena in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. The power output of highly-accreting quasars has impressive effects on their host galaxies. All the improvement in telescope light gathering and in computing power notwithstanding, we still miss a clear connection between observational properties and theory for quasars, as provided, for example, by the H-R diagram for stars. We do not yet have a complete self-consistent view of nuclear activity with predictive power, as we do for main-sequence stellar sources. At the same time quasars offer many “windows open onto the unknown". On small scales, quasar properties depend on phenomena very close to the black hole event horizon. On large scales, quasars may effect evolution of host galaxies and their circum-galactic environments. Quasars’ potential to map the matter density of the Universe and help reconstruct the Universe’s spacetime geometry is still largely unexploited. The times are ripe for a critical assessment of our present knowledge of quasars as accreting black holes and of their evolution across the cosmic time. The foremost aim of this research topic is to review and contextualize the main observational scenarios following an empirical approach, to present and discuss the accretion scenario, and then to analyze how a closer connection between theory and observation can be achieved, identifying those aspects of our understanding that are still on a shaky terrain and are therefore uncertain knowledge. This research topic covers topics ranging from the nearest environment of the black hole, to the environment of the host galaxies of active nuclei, and to the quasars as markers of the large scale structure and of the geometry of spacetime of the Universe. The spatial domains encom