Upcoming Events
Galileo’s Science Café - In Search of Elusive Giants: Detecting supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies
Feb 17, 2022, 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Verizon Auditorium, SciTech Campus & Virtual
In Search of Elusive Giants: Detecting supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies
Presented by Shobita Satyapal, Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Abstract: We know that monstrous black holes, one million to several billion times the mass of the sun, lurk in the centers of almost every large galaxy in the universe. They can have a profound effect on those galaxies and are capable of giving rise to the loudest gravitation signals in the universe when they merge.
In this talk, I will discuss my group’s research results in addition to several significant recent events in black hole astrophysics: the imaging of the event horizon of the M87 galaxy’s black hole; detection of colliding black holes from the LIGO interferometer; and the awarding of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics to Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for identifying the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.