The Puzzle of Galaxy and Black Hole Co-Evolution
Rachel Somerville
Rutgers
Monday Feb 6th, 4PM, LPL 308
Nearly all astronomers now believe that most or all
galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, and that many properties
of the galaxy are tightly correlated with the mass of the black
hole. It is becoming widely accepted that the energy released by these
growing black holes probably has a significant impact on the host
galaxy and its surroundings, and it has been suggested that this
process of "AGN feedback" could solve some outstanding problems in
cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. However, many important
questions remain unanswered: how do the "seed" black holes form and
what are their masses? How is black hole growth triggered and
regulated, and what is the physical origin of the correlation between
black hole mass and galaxy properties? What is the relationship
between star formation and black hole accretion? I will address some
of these questions by confronting predictions from theoretical models
with recent observational results from deep multi-wavelength surveys.
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