Description:

Nearly all galaxies appear to harbor a central supermassive black hole. The origin and properties of initial black hole seeds that grow to produce the detected supermassive black hole population are poorly constrained at present, as actively growing seeds are not directly observable near their birth epochs. Nevertheless, some unique signatures of seeding do survive and still exist in: local scaling relations between black holes and their galaxy hosts at low-masses; in high-redshift luminosity functions of accreting black holes; and in the total number and mass functions of gravitational wave coalescence events from merging binary black holes. I will describe these newly proposed observables that encapsulate information about seeding and permit disentangling the confounding effects of subsequent growth, merging and evolution that stand to erase the initial conditions. The availability of multi-wavelength, multi-messenger data, with upcoming and proposed missions & observational facilities, we stand to unravel the true nature of early seed black holes.

Seminar Speaker: Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale University

 Host: Faucher-Giguere

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Seminar, Colloquium