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Astronomy Colloquium Series:

Dr. Jonathan Trump, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, UCONN
Thursday, September 20, 2018
3:30-4:20 PM
411 West Hall Map
“Mapping the Census of Supermassive Black Holes”

The past 20 years have revealed that supermassive black holes play an essential role in the formation and growth of galaxies. But a reliable census of supermassive black holes over cosmic time has only now become possible, with the advent of two new emphases in astronomical surveys: massively multiplexed spatially resolved spectroscopy, and industrial-scale time-domain monitoring. I will show how Hubble WFC3 grism spectroscopy spatially resolves a population of nuclear black holes that are otherwise missed due to host galaxy dilution. CANDELS/3D-HST grism data uniquely reveal the black hole content of low-mass hosts, discriminating between models of black hole formation at cosmic dawn. Meanwhile the pioneering new SDSS-RM project is now vastly expanding the number of supermassive black holes with reliable mass measurements through time-domain echo-mapping. Beyond mass, SDSS-RM is also starting to enable the first survey measurements of the other two fundamental black hole quantities: accretion rate and spin. I will conclude by looking forward to the next generation of observatories: JWST, WFIRST, and Euclid for a new spatially resolved frontier of the supermassive black hole census, and SDSS-V and LSST for a new time-domain frontier of black hole mass, accretion, and spin.

Please note: Should you require any reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and opportunity related to this event please contact Stacy Tiburzi at 734-764-3440 or stibu@umich.edu
Building: West Hall
Website:
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Astronomy, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, Physics
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Astronomy, Department of Physics, Michigan Institute for Research in Astrophysics