When Galaxies Collide

The galaxies we see in the universe today formed through a hierarchical process of smaller galaxies merging together, often multiple times, over billions of years. During these mergers, the supermassive black holes residing in the galaxies’ centers also merge. In 2015, the LIGO experiment detected, for the first time, gravitational waves from the mergers of small black holes – but what about the supermassive ones in the centers of merging galaxies? How will we detect those? And where should we look to find these events? I will present a new project that I am developing to answer these questions and identify merging galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

Eilat Glikman (B.A., Rutgers University; PhD, Columbia University; NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale University) is an astrophysicist who has been on the faculty at Middlebury since 2013. She uses observations from ground- and space-based telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum to study how black holes grow in distant galaxies and their impact on their environment. She has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles on this subject and was featured in a PBS-NOVA program on black holes in 2018.

Hosted by Caitlin Myers, John G. McCullough Professor of Economics.

See the Faculty at Home website for additional information, including how to register for this free event: https://www.middlebury.edu/office/provost/faculty-home