Speaker: Suvi Gezari (in-person)
Contact Information:
Title: The Wild West of Nuclear Transients
Abstract: Central massive black holes will reveal themselves in a galaxy when they flicker and flare as they feed on gas and stars. We are conducting a systematic study of nuclear transients in the Zwicky Transient Facility alert stream, and have assembled the largest ever sample of tidal disruption events (TDEs), as well as revealed new extreme populations of flaring and “changing look” AGN. TDEs provide a rare glimpse of dormant massive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies, and their luminous outbursts of radiation are valuable probes of accretion physics, jet formation, and the circumnuclear environment and stellar population. The growing census of TDE discoveries, with hundreds more on the horizon with the start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, are enabling us to do population studies of TDEs for the first time. I will present exciting new developments in our understanding of the physical conditions driving the light curves, broadband spectral energy distributions, and spectroscopic sub-classes in TDEs, and how they relate to the properties of their host galaxies and the masses of their central supermassive black holes.
Visitor's room: 125
Tuesday (12 Apr. 2022): (below are the start time of each slot)
10:00 a.m.: Wenbin Lu (102 Peyton)
10:30 a.m.: Prep in Auditorium
11:00 a.m.: Colloquium
12:30 p.m.: Bahcall Lunch
1:45 p.m.: Michael Strauss (113 Peyton)
2:30 p.m.: Peter Melchior (131 Peyton)
3:00 p.m.: Grad Tea (033)
3:30 p.m.: Grad Tea (033)
4:00 p.m.: Ahmad Nemer
4:30 p.m.: Chris Bambic
5:00 p.m.: Mitsuru Kokubo (006 Peyton)
5:30 p.m.: Eliot Quataert (127 Peyton)
6:00 p.m.: DINNER - meet in Grand Central
Suvi Gezari
Faculty host: Jenny Greene
Postdoc host: Wenbin Lu
Eliot Quataert
Christopher Bambic
Nadia Zakamska
PLEASE NO MORE THAN 8 PEOPLE (it is more difficult to properly interact with the speaker with larger groups). STUDENTS HAVE PRIORITY.