Public AstroNight - "Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn"

Jordan Mirocha (McGill University (McGill Space Institute))

Mar 21, 2019 7:00 PM

Location: McConnell Engineering Building, Room 204
Public Lecture

A public talk by Dr. Jordan Mirocha (McGill Space Institute).

Black holes with millions to billions times the mass of our Sun live in the centers of nearly all galaxies today. While interesting in their own right as the densest objects in the Universe, whose gravitational grasp not even light can escape, black holes are also at the center of many puzzles in astrophysics. In this talk, I will focus on a few of these puzzles, from the apparent correlations between black hole masses and the properties of their host galaxies to the observation that such "super massive" black holes already exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. I will close by describing new ways astronomers are searching for black holes in the early Universe, and how such efforts may help resolve the outstanding challenges in understanding the cosmic evolution of black holes.