Speaker: Dr Jiachen Jiang (Cambridge)

Date: Thursday 30 March 2023

Time: 14:00

Location: Frank Lecture Theatre

The Accreting Supermassive Black Holes in our Universe

Black holes are the most extreme objects in the Universe, and their extremities have implications for physics more broadly. But because no light escapes from these light-gobbling monsters, we can only indirectly observe them through the radiation from their surrounding gas and dust. I will introduce the X-ray observations of the innermost regions just outside the event horizons of the supermassive black holes in galaxies, which current imaging technologies cannot resolve. In particular, I will focus on their radiation processes, accretion geometry and the origin of the observed variability.