[Emeriti-faculty] Updated events for the Thursday and Friday

[Gayle Grant <gayle grant tufts edu>]

Good morning:

Updated events for the Department of Physics and Astronomy
Please note change below.

*Friday
February 13, 2009, Noon

Robinson 251

Graduate and Undergraduate students meet with Dr. Gallo for informal lunch.
Pizza and soda will be provided.

*(Please note change in day)



Friday
February 13, 2009 3:00 pm Anderson Hall, Room 206

?Eight Powers of Ten: Energy Feedback from Accreting Black Holes?

Elena Gallo
MIT

Black holes have progressed from a curiosity of mathematical physics to
a tool for building or studying models in other branches of physics:
Examples range from particle accelerators to feedback mechanisms that
may control the formation and evolution of galaxies.  Accretion onto
black holes -i.e. the extraction of gravitational potential energy from
the infalling gas- is responsible for powering the most luminous
sources of the universe. At the same time, part of the accreting gas
can be turned around and propelled outward via bipolar streams with
highly relativistic velocities. In fact, observations of black holes
over different accretion regimes indicate that a substantial fraction
of the available accretion energy budget, rather than being radiated,
is dissipated by relativistic outflows in the form of mechanical
energy.  In this talk, I will discuss the issue of energy feedback from
accreting black holes ranging from super-massive objects at the center
of external galaxies down to stellar mass black holes in galactic
binary systems. I will then present the first results from AMUSE-Virgo,
a multi-wavelength survey aimed at constraining the incidence and
effects of nuclear black holes in 100 nearby spheroidal galaxies

Refreshments served in Knipp Library, Robinson 250, at 2:30 pm.