18 November 2010

Speaker: Yue Shen (CfA / Clay Fellow)

Title: Clay Fellowship Lecture: Pairs of supermassive black holes: from 100 Mpc to pc scales

Abstract:Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses ranging from a few million to a few billion solar masses are ubiquitous in the heart of nearly every massive galaxy in the nearby Universe. At earlier times, these monsters shine as they engulf a large amount of fuel during their growth and are witnessed as quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Not only is their own growth history interesting, but also the quasar/AGN phase may have influenced the host galaxy in profound ways. Understanding the cosmic growth of SMBHs, their connections to their host galaxies and the physics of quasar/AGN phenomena is the central theme in modern studies of SMBHs. This field has now entered a brand new era, flooded with data from multi-wavelength surveys. These increasingly larger and homogeneous datasets are providing unprecedented statistics and covering various aspects of the SMBH population. This talk focuses on the large-scale (>1 Mpc) distribution of quasars and small-scale (less than 1 Mpc) pairs of AGNs. The large-scale distribution of quasars tells us about the properties of their host dark matter halos, while close AGN pairs can teach us a great deal about how interactions and mergers affect AGN activity. I will mainly talk about the measurement of the two-point correlation function of quasars selected from SDSS, and our ongoing searches for small-scale AGN pairs.

Video of the Presentation (Talks can be viewed with RealPlayer. Free download is available from www.real.com )