Title: News from around our central supermassive black hole

Speaker: Q. Daniel Wang (University of Massachusetts)

Time & Place: Thursday, 3:00pm, October 24th, 3rd floor Lecture Hall

Abstract: Essentially all major galaxies are believed to contain a supermassive black hole at their centers. But such black holes are typically very dim, unlike their counterparts in the distant universe. The question is why. Several ongoing events are shedding lights on Sgr A* - the ultra-dim supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These include 1) a cool gas cloud being tidally destructed by the black hole, 2) its ejection of > 99% of the matter captured, and 3) a magnetar appearing less than 3" away. These events have been providing new and unique opportunities of exciting research on the black hole, leading to the understanding of similar phenomena and processes in nuclear regions of other galaxies.

Biog: Daniel is a Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his PhD in 1990 from Columbia University, for which he was awarded the ASP Robert J. Trumpler Award for Outstanding North American Ph.D Dissertation Research in Astronomy. He went on to hold a number of prestigious postdoctoral fellowships and has over 150 publications, including first-author papers in both Nature and Science.