June 10, 2016 8-10PM

Title: Black Holes Don�t Suck
Lecturer: Chiara Mingarelli
Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution: Caltech
Abstract:
Black holes have gained notoriety as dangerous cosmic vacuum cleaners � sucking up everything in their path. I will dispel this myth by guiding you through the weird and wonderful world of black holes with masses from several to millions (even billions) times the mass of the sun, called supermassive black holes. We will learn how to hunt for black holes by using several techniques. We can use the light from black holes' companion stars, or we can use accreting gas, which heats and shines as it falls onto the black hole. But what if there are no stars or gas nearby? We can then �listen� to the black holes by searching for gravitational waves � ripples of in the fabric of spacetime. For smaller black holes, we use lasers to pick up gravitational waves. For supermassive black holes, we use a detector which is the size of our of our galaxy, together with the remnants of dead stars called pulsars. After this tour of the black hole landscape, hopefully you will agree that black holes don�t suck!