Dr. Karina Voggel

Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at the Strasbourg Observatory in France.

Before that I was a post-doctoral researcher also in Strasbourg, as well as the University of Utah. I did my thesis at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching and the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universität (LMU) Munich as a fellow of the International Max Planck Research School on Astrophysics (IMPRS). Before that I did my undergrad at the University of Heidelberg

My research has been focussed on using globular clusters and nuclear star clusters of galaxies as tracers of galaxy and super-massive black hole physics. If you want to know more about this please continue reading below.

I am also often doing outreach events about Astronomy in either German, English or the French language. For an inquiries to join your event, drop me an email

Closest super-massive Black hole pair ever discovered

Me and my team have discovered the closest pair of super-massive black holes ever (see image above). We directly dynamically detect two SMBHs that are only 500pc (1600 light years) apart from each other, making it the only known SMBH pair with a sub-kpc separation. The offset second super-massive black hole is likely embedded in the relic nucleus of the galaxy that merged with NGC7727 a couple Billion years ago. Our simulations show that it will merge in around 250 Million years into one even bigger black hole. Beyond being the closest SMBH pair our work is another confirmation that many SMBHs exist outside the centers of galaxies as relics of accreted galaxies, that have not been discovered yet.

You can find more info on this object in video below and in the ESO press release here: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2117/