Image of Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter's tea party You are cordially invited to afternoon tea and biscuits wine and chocolate

Astronomy Tea Talks at Caltech

Mondays, Hameetman auditorium (Cahill)
Tea:  4.00pm
Talk: 4.15pm

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2011 - 2012 season:
13 June 2011 Benny Trakhtenbrot (Tel-Aviv University)

'Observing the Growth of the Most Massive Black Holes at High Redshifts'

There is ample evidence that the most significant growth epoch of the majority of super-massive black holes (SMBHs) must have occurred at z>1-2. I will present our team’s efforts to measure black hole masses and accretion rates in several high-redshift samples of AGNs, based on extensive NIR spectroscopic campaigns. I will particularly focus on a large sample of z~5 AGNs, which were observed in a combined VLT-Gemini campaign. This sample probes the most massive BHs at this epoch, but shows lower masses and higher accretion rates than those of z~2-3.5 sources. When combining these samples together, a clear evolutionary sequence is evident: the z~5 BHs grow through Eddington-limited accretion from a broad range of seed masses; their subsequent growth, at duty cycles of ~10-20%, forms the most massive BHs observed at z~2. I will also mention a few follow-up campaigns which aim at understanding the co-evolution of these BHs with their host galaxies.
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Last modified on 20th Aug 2011 by Marco Viero.  

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