Home | About | Upcoming | Archives | Other PITP Archives | PITP

 

7:30 pm, March, March 22nd, 2017
Room 202, Hennings Building
6224 Agricultural Road, UBC

 

Supermassive Black Holes

John Kormendy

University of Texas, Austin

Supermassive black holes, with masses up to many billions of Suns, live at the centers of many galaxies. They power quasars, where a volume as tiny as our Solar System outshines by many times a host galaxy made from hundreds of billions of stars. As in Hercules A, they can fire jets of particles like firehoses millions of light years into space. I review how this picture was developed, starting with my first supermassive black hole discovery in the Andromeda Galaxy in 1988. I will also describe how, with 86 supermassive black hole detections, we can now begin to understand how they do (and do not) affect the evolution of their host galaxies; and how they may have begun with the merging of dead remnants of the first stars that formed in the Universe.

To learn more please visit his webpage.

Additional resources for this talk: slides(not available yet), video.