Abstract:
Black holes are among the most fascinating astrophysical objects and have long entranced the public. I will describe recent progress in discovering black holes beyond one billion solar masses lurking at the centers of massive elliptical galaxies in the local universe. These massive black holes are plausible descendants of luminous quasars in the young universe and inform us of how cosmic structures evolved over the past 10 billion years. Merging black hole binaries in this mass range are also the primary sources of gravity waves in the nano-Hertz range targeted by ongoing pulsar timing array experiments.
Brief Bio:
Chung-Pei Ma is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. She received both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served as the cosmology Scientific Editor for the Astrophysical Journal. Her research interests span the properties of dark matter and dark energy, the cosmic microwave background, galaxy formation and evolution, supermassive black holes, and the large-scale structure of the universe.