Title: Multi-Messenger Echoes of Supermassive Black Holes

Speaker: Prof. Jonathan Trump, University of Connecticut

Host: Mouyuan Sun

Time: 14:30-16:30, Thursday, Sept 26, 2019

Location: Physics Building 552 

Abstract: Our new era of gravitational wave astrophysics has opened an entirely new frontier for understanding black holes, from their birth in the early Universe to the supermassive monsters observed in all massive galaxies today. I will demonstrate how a new generation of industrial-scale time-domain surveys is creating a new multi-messenger view of supermassive black holes. The pioneering new SDSS-RM project uses light echoes to map the three fundamental quantities that describe astrophysical black holes: mass, spin, and growth rate. In the next decade, the new SDSS-V Black Hole Mapper and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will map millions of supermassive black holes in light echoes, complementing the gravitational echoes seen soon in pulsar timing and (eventually) LISA. I will also discuss how Hubble Space Telescope spectroscopy can spatially resolve off-nuclear black holes. Very soon, the first James Webb Space Telescope observations in the CEERS project will similarly resolve the first black hole seeds in the early Universe. The next generation of multi-messenger experiments make it a truly bright time for understanding the dark nature of black hole astrophysics.