Today’s Colloquium:
Presenter: Rachel Somerville, Rutgers University
Title: The mysterious intertwined life-cycle of galaxies
and their supermassive black holes
Abstract: It is now widely believed that most massive
galaxies harbor supermassive black holes in their nuclei, and that the mass of the black hole is strongly correlated with galaxy properties such as mass or luminosity. In addition, the evolution of the global star formation rate density over cosmic time seems
to closely trace that of the global black hole accretion rate, suggesting that galaxies and their black holes grew together. However, in individual objects, star formation and black hole growth often appear to be uncorrelated. Moreover, many questions remain
about the origin and evolution of supermassive black holes in galaxies, for example: what are the masses and physical origin of the first seed black holes? How is black hole activity triggered and regulated? How does the energy released by accreting black
holes shape their host galaxies? I will address these questions by presenting predictions from theoretical models that attempt to track the intertwined growth of galaxies and their black holes in a cosmological context, and confronting these predictions with
recent observations from multi-wavelength surveys.
Interest:
AST
3:00pm in Robinson Hall, Room 253
Shannon
Shannon R. Landis, MEd
Department Manager
Physics & Astronomy
Tufts University
212 College Ave.
Medford, MA 02155
(617) 627-5360
(617) 627-3878 fax
Shannon Landis Tufts edu