RASC Edmonton Regular Meeting: December 14, 2020

RASC Edmonton Online Meeting

Monday December 14th, 7:30PM MST

Zoom Meeting Format. Use the link below to join the meeting.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89417145494

Featured Speaker

Dr. Tyrone Woods:

Titans of the Early Universe: The birth of the first black holes

 

At the heart of every galaxy lies a giant—a supermassive black hole anywhere from millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Our understanding of these mysterious objects is growing quickly;  last year, the first image of a black hole was released by the Event Horizon Telescope, and this year the Nobel prize was awarded in part for the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Galaxy. Many basic questions remain unanswered, however, including how these black holes formed in the first place, and how they became so staggeringly massive. In this talk, I’ll show how the recent revelation that black holes a billion times the mass of the Sun already existed during the first billion years of cosmic history presents a stark challenge to our understanding of how they formed, and I’ll highlight the recent and upcoming efforts in Canada to unravel the mysterious origins of these primordial titans.