Professor Chung-Pei Ma
UC Berkeley
Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes at the Centers of Galaxies
Location: 1080 Physics Research Building
Faculty Host: John Beacom
Abstract:
Supermassive black holes are a fundamental component of galaxies.
Residing at the centers of galaxies, these black holes have masses up to tens of billion suns and directly impact the evolution of their host galaxies.
I will describe recent progress in discovering new populations of these objects and the implications for the symbiotic relationships between black holes and galaxies.
Merging supermassive black hole binaries are expected to be the primary sources for low-frequency gravitational waves
probed by ongoing pulsar timing array experiments.
Residing at the centers of galaxies, these black holes have masses up to tens of billion suns and directly impact the evolution of their host galaxies.
Bio:
C-P Ma received both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2002, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and an Assistant and Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Ma is an avid violin player and was an exchange student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston while studying cosmic strings and theoretical cosmology at MIT. She was the first prize winner in the Taiwan National Violin Competition in 1983. Ma is the cosmology scientific editor for the Astrophysical Journal.
