Science on Tap: The Feeding Habits of Supermassive Black Holes

Black holes are undoubtedly some of the most mysterious objects in the known universe. This mystery seems to sit poorly with some, often earning them descriptions in the media such as “gargantuan monsters”, “gravitational terrors”, and even “one-way passages to doom”! In this talk, I aim to shed some light (metaphorically, of course, since light can’t escape them) on the most-feared aspect of black holes - what they eat. In particular, I’ll focus on supermassive black holes - objects weighing up to 10^10 times the mass of our sun, or ~10^40 pounds. We’ll discuss how they get so large, what they typically dine upon, and the observational signatures produced by different feeding habits.

Speaker: Sierra Dodd, UC Santa Cruz