Fuelling AGN with galaxy interactions
Identifying black hole gas fuelling mechanisms is important to understand how supermassive black holes grow and what physical conditions favour the onset of black hole activity. However, it is challenging to find clear observational signatures of black hole fuelling. In this presentation I will show that galaxy interactions, such as major mergers, minor mergers or galaxy flybys, provide the necessary conditions to fuel AGN. I will describe how we use kinematically misaligned gas to observationally identify galaxies that went through an interaction. With this method we have recently shown that galaxies that have misaligned gas have a higher observed fraction of AGN. This is the first time that an observational connection is seen between the process of formation and/or presence of misaligned structures and the fuelling of active supermassive black holes. In this presentation I will also discuss the dependence of this trend on morphology and the incidence of radio, X-ray and optically detected AGN in galaxies with misaligned gas.