Events at Physics |
Events on Thursday, April 6th, 2023
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Reverberation mapping the inner environments of AGN
- Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- Place: 4421 Sterling Hall
- Speaker: Yasaman Homayouni, Penn State University
- Abstract: Reliable measurements of black hole mass and accretion-disk structure are critical to understanding the growth history of black holes and galaxy evolution over cosmic time. Beyond the local Universe, the gold standard for black hole mass and accretion-disk structure is reverberation mapping. I will present the latest results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project and show how it has transformed our understanding of supermassive black holes by dramatically expanding the number of quasars with reliable mass and accretion structure at z > 0.3. I will also present a promising new method for reliably measuring mass and accretion structure of early black holes using direct accretion-disk structure measurement from future massive time-domain quasar studies with SDSS-V and LSST.
- Host: Ke Zhang