February 14, 2024 8-10 PM

Event Type: Lecture and Stargazing
Title: Powerful Jets from Supermassive Black Holes
Lecturer: Martijn Oei
Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution: Caltech
Abstract:
Consider how the sky would look if you could see it in radio waves. Instead of stars, you would see a vista of strange behemoths, many of them appearing larger than the sun and the moon in our sky. These are cosmic fireworks left by powerful jets that originate from spinning black holes at the cores of galaxies. In this talk, we introduce Porphyrion, a record-breaking jet pair that my team at Caltech recently co-discovered using the Keck I Telescope on Hawaiʻi. Each jet spans a distance of about 100 times the size of our Milky Way. Even at a distance of ten billion light years, it appears to us as large as half the moon in our sky! We will also discuss how jets form (and what this reveals about black hole dining habits), how jets journey into the depths of intergalactic space, and what violent effects jets have on galaxy evolution and cosmology.