Title: Weighing the Invisible: Probing Supermassive Black Holes with ALMA

Speaker: Martin Bureau

Abstract: Supermassive black holes are now known to lurk at the centres of most galaxies, and are believed to play a key role in their evolution. Here, I will present key results from the mm-Wave Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high resolution survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. First, I will show that CO can be used to easily and accurately measure the masses of the supermassive black holes lurking at galaxy centres. Second, I will discuss substantial ongoing efforts to do exactly that, and present many spectacular new measurements, the latest of which rival the best black hole measurements to date. Third, I will compare molecular gas and megamaser measurements, discuss black hole scaling relations, and introduce the newly-discovered "mm fundamental plane of black hole accretion", that is surprisingly tight and holds for a wide variety of active galactic nuclei and stellar-mass black holes. This work opens the way to literally hundreds of measurements across the Hubble sequence (in both active and non-active galaxies) with a unique method, and thus promises to revolutionise our understanding of the co-evolution of galaxies and black holes.

Bio: Martin Bureau is a self-described galaxy guru, with an interest in anything and everything galactic. He is particularly interested in using observations and theoretical studies of the gas, stars, and dark matter that make up galaxies to constrain their formation and evolution. 

Martin is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and Lindemann Fellow and Tutor in Physics at Wadham College. He has been in Oxford for nearly two decades, following appointments at Columbia University as a NASA Hubble Fellow and at Leiden University. He obtained his PhD from The Australian National University and is originally from Montreal, Canada.

Martin Bureau：英国牛津大学天体物理学教授，曾任牛津大学Wadham书院院长，美国NASA哈勃博士后奖获得者，教育部“高校学科创新引智计划”入选海外专家。他的主要研究兴趣为星系结构与动力学，作为骨干参与了多个著名国际研究项目，包括Atlas3D，SAURON和WISDOM等。

Time: 14:00-15:00, 20/Nov, Wednesday
Venue: Room 506 (Large seminar room), Department of Astronomy

You can also access the colloquium via :

https://www.koushare.com/space/329883/live-series/4614