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Thursday, 25 May 2023 |
Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support - Video.mp4 (ca. 454 Mb) |
15:15 – 16:25 |
"A tale of two black holes: Sgr A* and M87*"
Sera Markoff
(API/GRAPPA, University of Amsterdam)
Abstract:
Black holes are one of the most exotic
consequences of Einstein’s General Relativity,
yet they are also very common,
ranging from stellar remnants up to beasts billions
of times more massive than our
sun. Despite their reputation as cosmic
vacuum
cleaners,
they actually drive extremely complicated astrophysical systems
that can majorly influence their
surroundings. Via their powerful
outflows
in particular, black holes
shape the way the Universe looks today...but not at all times.
Black holes undergo cycles of activity, so to
understand their role over cosmological
timescales
we need to understand not only how they power such outflows from just
outside
their event horizons, but also what drives their cyclic behavior. Thanks to the
Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) we have now
directly imaged the event horizon region
for two nearby supermassive black holes:
Sgr A* in our own Galactic center, and
M87* in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. After a brief review of the key results so far,
I will put them into the context of our
greater understanding of black hole activity,
with emphasis on the gains made
by combining EHT observations with those from
other
multi-wavelength facilities. I will also
discuss the near- and longterm outlook
for the studies of black hole
astrophysics and their cosmic impact.Th
Biography:
Sera Markoff
defended her thesis in Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of
Arizona in 2000.
She was a Humboldt Research fellow at the Max Planck Institute
for Radio astronomy in Bonn
between 2000 and 2002. She took up National Science
Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at MIT
in 2002, where she stayed for 3 years.
Sera Markoff
then moved to University of Amsterdam, where she has been a full
professor
since 2017. Prof. Markoff has been a member of
the Event Horizon
Telescope collaboration since 2016, and vice-chair of the science council since 2019.