Speaker's Night: Active Galaxies: A Hunt to Understand What Feeds These Galactic Monsters

In the 1940s, as the catalog of known galaxies grew, astronomers soon noticed a group of outliers that showed substantially different galactic cores. At first glance, these galaxies often appear optically normal and indistinguishable from others; however, spectral measurements of the light from their cores revealed these objects to be highly active and emitting an extraordinary amount of energy. We now recognize these objects to belong to an important group called Active Galaxies, which include various sub-groups like Quasars, Radio galaxies, and Seyferts. This extreme activity from their cores is a result of accretion onto a supermassive black hole. Janakan Sivasubramanium's research involves understanding what is the source of gas supplied to the black hole. He studies statistics of how galaxies cluster by examining and modeling the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We explore the interesting possibility of whether galactic cannibalism of neighboring satellite galaxies may be fuelling the core of Active galaxies.

Talk starts at 7:30pm, socializing at 7:00pm.

Who can attend: Everyone including non-members
Fee: Free
Reservation: Not required
Location: Ontario Science Centre (follow the signs to the RASC meeting)