12:00–1:00 pm ERC 401
Host: Anastasia Sokolenko
Colin Burke (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) "Optical variability of intermediate-mass black holes and implications for their identification"
Optical variability is a novel probe of accreting intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) candidates in dwarf galaxies. In this talk, I will show recent results demonstrating the characteristic “damping” timescale of AGN optical light curves correlates strongly with the mass of the black hole. Extension to stellar-mass accretion disks suggests the interpretation may be universal, and could be a powerful new tool for identifying the elusive population of accreting IMBHs. To that end, we have developed a forward model to constrain the local black hole mass function (BHMF) using optical variability with Rubin Observatory. The ultimate goal is that this relic BHMF, when probed in the IMBH regime, will reveal the signature of how supermassive black holes were seeded at high redshifts.
About speaker: Colin Burke is a 5th year PhD student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working under Prof. Xin Liu and Prof. Yue Shen. Colin will move to Yale University in August as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow.
