Giant Black Holes Devouring Stars: Extreme Cosmic Events Illuminating
In the center of every big galaxy, there is an enormous black hole with billions of stars orbiting around it. Astrophysicists want to study how these black holes grow together with galaxies throughout cosmic history and how they affect the surrounding spacetime. However, this is a hard task, since these black holes are usually dark and faraway.
Recently, a lot of progress has been made in studying how such massive black holes can tear apart stars wandering too close. Such phenomena, called tidal disruption events, can produce very bright flares which temporarily illuminate the black holes. In this talk, Professor Dai will show how massive black holes destroy and eat stars, why general relativity is important in the whole process, and how the properties of massive black holes can be probed through such events. She will also discuss how the frontier of this research topic has been pushed forward by using modern telescopes and large-scale computer simulations.
Prof. Jane Dai is a theoretical astrophysicist working at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 2012. She was a joint postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and the University of Chile, and then a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland. She joined the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark as an assistant professor before moving to Hong Kong. Her research interests include black hole accretion disks, jets, tidal disruption events, X-ray reverberation mapping, and computational relativistic astrophysics.
Introducer and Co-host: Peter Maksym, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
