Prof. Suvi Gezari

Welcome to the Maryland Black Hole Discovery Lab!  We are engaged in various research programs related to the study of massive black holes in the Universe.  We use time domain observations across the electromagnetic spectrum to discover massive black holes, illuminate their demographics and host environments, and tackle the most fundamental questions of how massive black holes first form in the Early Universe, and how they grow over cosmic time.  

We use survey telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum to catch massive black holes in the act of tidally disrupting and accreting stars, as well as to detect other interesting transient and variable phenomena from the nuclei of galaxies: ZTF (optical) and Rubin (optical) now, and in the near future: Roman (near-infrared), Lazuli (optical), ULTRASAT (NUV), and UVEX (NUV & FUV).   We also use follow-up observations with the Lowell Discovery Telescope, SEDM, the NASA Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope,  the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, the NASA James Webb Space Telescope, and XMM-Newton to characterize the events and their host galaxies, and probe their associated accretion physics.