The next SFB-colloquium will be on January 28 at 2 pm in lecture hall III of the physics institutes in Cologne.
Florian Peißker from the SFB1601 / I. Physics Institute, University of Cologne
will talk about “To be or not to be: a putative IMBH in the close vicinity of the supermassive black hole SgrA*“.
The discrepancy between the age of the Universe and the timescales associated with the accretion rate of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) remains a key astrophysical mystery. As a major building block of our Universe, this lack of knowledge about the formation of SMBHs may reveal fundamental physical processes that can help to understand the evolution of massive galaxies discovered after the Big Bang with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As an evolutionary link between stellar-mass black holes and SMBHs, intermediate-mass black holes have been proposed to resolve the before mentioned discrepancy. However, only about 300 candidate intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) have been discovered in X-ray surveys. Only a fraction of these IMBHs can be classified as confirmed. Interestingly, an IMBH has been discovered at a distance of 0.1 pc from our SMBH, Sgr A*. Here, I will discuss the results of this finding and present alternative interpretations of the IMBH.
See also: https://sfb1601.astro.uni-koeln.de/events/sfb1601-colloquium/