YCAA Seminar: “Using the “COSMOS” to Understand Black Hole and Galaxy Co-evolution”, Francesca Civano, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Event time: 
Tuesday, February 21, 2017 - 2:30pm
Hours of operation: 

coffee/tea and cookies will be served in the lounge of Steinbach Hall (52 Hillhouse) starting at 2 PM.

Location: 
Watson (), A-51 See map
60 Sachem St
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Observations indicate that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) dwell at the centers of most local galaxies. Scaling relations between SMBH mass and several large-scale properties of the host galaxies point to a co-ordindated growth of galaxies and their central engines over cosmic time. Who is the leading actor on the the cosmic stage: the black hole or the galaxy? Is black hole activity triggering star-formation or suppressing it? Does the galaxy control the black hole growth?

In this talk I will present my work using the extraordinarily rich multiwavelength dataset of the Cosmic Evolutionary Survey (COSMOS) to investigate black hole and galaxy co-evolution. I will concentrate on the highest energy data available, the X-ray ones, from the surveys I have led using both the Chandra and NuSTAR satellites. These data provide us with a unique and powerful tool to find and study accreting SMBHs in the distant Universe. Using both X-ray detections and non-detections, we can study the BH and galaxy relation over 5 orders of magnitude in host galaxy mass.