Virtual participation: Zoom details available here
Speaker: Dr John Regan, Maynooth University
Title: "Everything you ever wanted to know about Massive Black Holes but were too afraid to ask"
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in observations of black holes have significantly advanced our understanding of both the characteristics and the demographics of massive black holes. Gravitational wave observations of stellar mass black holes with LIGO/Virgo/Kagra have shown a higher mass spectrum than expected. At the other end of the mass and spatial spectrum observations with the James Webb Space Telescope have shown that massive black holes, with masses in excess of one million times the mass of the Sun, are in-place only a few hundred years after the Big Bang. In this talk I will outline both the observational and computational breakthroughs of the last decade and outline a number of challenges that these (observational) breakthrough have on the field. In particular I will outline the computational challenges of trying the model the formation and evolution of black holes and of how we can connect our models to observation.
Biography: I received my PhD from Cambridge in 2009. I then worked in Intel from 2009-2010 and as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Zambia from 2011-2013. At that stage, after almost five years outside of mainstream research, I returned to research in 2013 at the University of Helsinki as a postdoc. In 2016 I was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship and returned to Ireland and DCU. In 2019 I was awarded a Royal Society-SFI University Research Fellowship which I brought to Maynooth. I started in Maynooth in January 2020. In July 2022 I was awarded an IRC Laureate Award. I currently have five PhD students and two postdocs in my group here in Maynooth.