Programme by Session

In this talk, we show how high-angular resolution observations can efficiently disentangle the infrared emission from AGN and star formation in local galaxies, and thus, allow us to study the dust structures of both separately, as well as their interplay. Until recently, the mid-infrared emission of AGN was thought to predominantly originate from a toroidal obscuring structure. However, our new observations reveal that the mid-infrared is dominated by emission from the polar regions of the AGN, reaching up to kilo-parsec scales in some objects. The most likely explanation for this is a powerful dusty wind that, thanks to the large intersection of the dust particles for optical/IR radiation, can efficiently be driven by radiation pressure, both from primary emission of the accretion disk and internal reprocessing. We will review the current evidence for such dusty winds in AGN and present new deep high-angular resolution mid-infrared observations of a local AGN sample to test the ubiquity of this phenomenon. Then, using the full sample of all AGN with resolved polar dust emission, we will compare the observations to our newly developed 3D radiative transfer models of a physically and observationally motivated AGN dust structure and show that both SEDs and morphologies can be well explained. Finally, we discuss whether these dusty winds could be an important ingredient for AGN feedback onto the host galaxies, something that we will be able to fully assess with JWST in the near future.