6 Mar. 2025 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
Although parking for this meeting at the Reuter Center is free, you must register your vehicle with a “visitor daily” permit at this link. Once registration is complete, visitors will not need to print or display a permit; the new system utilizes camera-based License Plate Recognition technology. All vehicles must park front-end in, so that the license plate is visible.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
Hunting for Relic Black Holes throughout Cosmic Time
– presented by Chris Richardson, Ph.D., Elon University
At the center of all large galaxies, like the Milky Way, resides a supermassive black hole millions of times the mass of the Sun. Strong evidence suggests that these black holes and their host galaxies co-evolve with one another, which makes understanding how black holes grow to be supermassive of paramount importance. Unfortunately, intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) representing early stages of black hole growth are scandalously rare. One promising avenue for finding them occurs in dwarf galaxies, which are much smaller than the Milky Way and thus likely to harbor lower-mass black holes. In this talk, I will present the current landscape for detecting and simulating IMBHs. Recent observations of early universe galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that relic black holes might have evolved differently than those found in the present day. At the same time, analysis of nearby dwarf galaxies suggests that IMBHs might be more common than previously thought.