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.

Speaker: Dr. Steve Croft, UC Berkeley