YCAA Seminar: “The Supermassive Black Hole Census over Cosmic Time” - Jon Trump, University of Connecticut

Event time: 
Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - 2:30pm to 3:30pm
Location: 
Watson Center (WTS), A51 See map
60 Sachem Street
New Haven, CT 06511

The past 20 years have revealed that supermassive black holes play an essential role in the formation and growth of galaxies. In the local universe, every massive galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole, with black hole mass tightly coupled to the mass of the galaxy bulge. But a complete census of supermassive black holes over cosmic time has remained elusive, particularly in the “chicken-or-egg” formation of the first galaxies and black hole seeds. I will show how probabilistic, forward-modeling techniques reveal a hidden population of supermassive black holes missed by previous surveys. When applied to SDSS and Hubble CANDELS/3D-HST observations, these methods enable the first census of black holes in low-mass and star-forming galaxies, for a fossil record that discriminates between models of early-universe black hole seed formation. Beyond simply identifying supermassive black hole activity, I will also discuss the importance of time-domain surveys in mapping black hole mass and accretion, showing results from the pioneering new SDSS-RM project. I will conclude by looking forward to the next generation of observatories: JWST, WFIRST, and Euclid for a new spatially resolved frontier of supermassive black hole selection, and LSST and PFS for a new time-domain frontier of black hole mass and accretion.

Open to: 
undergraduate