Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies present unsolved theoretical challenges for our understanding of high-energy astrophysics, gravity and gravitational waves, star and galaxy formation, and space plasma physics. For decades, our models have struggled to understand how such “monster” black holes could form and exist at all. But recent novel multi-physics, multi-scale simulations have led to major breakthroughs. I’ll show how these have transformed our understanding of how such black holes could form, “where they come from,” and how they grow. With the novel ability to follow the plasma radiation-magneto-thermo-chemistry from scales of megaparsecs down to horizon scales, we can now see that many of the foundational assumptions of textbook accretion theory are incorrect. The accretion modes that exist are qualitatively novel, and this in turn completely changes our intuition about how the “seeds” of black holes grow rapidly in the early Universe, how they shine as quasars and behave in black hole mergers, how stars form around black holes, and how their “feedback” in the form of radiation and jets influences their galactic environments.