Supermassive Black Hole and Galaxy Co-Evolution with PRIMA 

Speaker

Jed McKinney (University of Texas, Austin)

Abstract

Galaxies have grown their stars and central supermassive black holes by orders of magnitude over the last ~10 billion years. Both of these processes, star formation and black hole accretion, compete for the same resources to grow: cold gas. Moreover, bursts in star formation and black hole growth are among the most energetic events that galaxies experience, depositing significant amounts of energy into the gas as a source of feedback. This balance between positive and negative feedback effects is highly complex. As a result, most simulations predict different paths for how stars and supermassive black holes grow in tandem. Adding to this problem is the fact that galaxies are heavily obscured by dust, making it difficult to disentangle star formation and black hole growth with current observatories. Enter PRIMA, a 1.8m next-generation far-infrared, cryogenically cooled space observatory operating between 24-235um. In this community P-CAST talk I will present an overview of PRIMA’s PI science goals for addressing the co-evolution of stars and black holes in galaxies. PRIMA will pierce the dust-obscured veils of galaxies out to z~2 to photometrically and spectroscopically separate signatures of star formation and supermassive black hole accretion for statistical samples. This will provide unprecedented empirical constraint the most important drivers of galaxy formation. 

Seminar Connection

Please visit the P-CAST webpage https://prima.ipac.caltech.edu/page/p-cast for a link to join and to see all of our upcoming speakers!