Monster Black Holes: What Lurks at the Center of Galaxies

Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in the cosmos and have long entranced the public as well as astronomers.  Today we understand that black holes can grow to monstrous size, swallowing the mass of millions or billions of suns. New telescopes and techniques in the past decade have expanded and improved our ability to weigh such "supermassive black holes."  Dr. Ma will describe recent discoveries of record-breaking black holes, each with a mass of ten billion times the mass of the Sun.  New evidence shows that these objects could be the dormant remnants of powerful "quasars" that existed in the young universe.

Speaker: Chung-Pei Ma is Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the origin and large-scale structure of the universe, the formation and development of galaxies, and the growth of giant black holes.  She is also an avid violin player and pursued parallel studies in physics and music at MIT and the New England Conservatory of Music.