ITC Colloquium - Jamie Law-Smith (ITC)

Date: 

Thursday, October 7, 2021, 11:00am to 12:00pm

Location: 

Zoom
"Interactions between black holes, stars, and galaxies"

A physical understanding of the high energy interactions between black holes and stars, coupled with the context of their galactic birthplaces, allows us to use these systems as tools to better understand black holes at all masses, the lives and deaths of stars, and the dynamical mechanisms operating in galaxies. In this talk, I will discuss one particular interaction: the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. I will present a library of tidal disruption event simulations and will show that it can be reduced to a single relationship. I will then connect these AU-scale events to kpc-scale galaxy physics. I will also spend a few minutes discussing the work I plan to do in the next few years at the ITC—including understanding the systems that lead to gravitational-wave sources, understanding the structure of AGN disks with embedded stars, and understanding de Sitter space in theories of quantum gravity such as string theory.
See also: Colloquium, 2021-22