Snacking, Gorging, and Cannibalizing: The Feeding Habits of Black Holes

A new generation of telescopes is coming online. Operating at wavelengths from radio, through optical, to gamma ray, they are particularly well-suited to time-domain survey science: essentially, making large-format movies of the sky. These telescopes will have the capability to tell us about how black holes grow: through cannibalizing each other in stupendous mergers that shake the very fabric of space-time, through swallowing huge volumes of ten million degree gas, and through shredding and consuming stars that happen to pass too close. The new observations of these processes are helping to transform our understanding of the growth of the enormous black holes that lurk at the heart of almost all galaxies.

Steve is an Assistant Project Astronomer working on large radio surveys, and transient and variable astronomical sources. He helped commission the Allen Telescope Array for science operations and developed data analysis pipelines. He got his PhD from the University of Oxford, working on actively feeding supermassive black holes in galaxy cluster environments. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, studying distant galaxy clusters, as well as investigating a fascinating burst of star formation triggered by a jet from a nearby black hole. Steve is an expert in the use of data at a wide range of wavelengths from many different telescopes.

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