Methodist Hall, Chipping Norton – 7pm for 7.30pm start

Summary: Almost every known galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its heart, including our own Milky Way, which have masses millions to billions that of our Sun. Understanding how these monster black holes shape their surroundings is crucial to our understanding of how galaxies evolve. Some black holes are very energetic, launching powerful winds and jets, and are referred to as “active”. We have recently found a population of these active black holes that are extremely bright (referred to as “quasars”) and enshrouded by dust that exhibit peculiar properties. An emerging theory is that these dusty black holes represent a key stage in galaxy evolution.

DR Vicky Fawcett is an astronomy postdoctoral researcher at Newcastle University studying quasars: extremely bright galaxies powered by supermassive black holes.  She is part of two major astronomy collaborations: the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), an optical spectrograph on the Mayall telescope in Arizona, and the Multi-object Optical and Near-IR spectrograph (MOONS), an infrared spectrograph soon to be installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile.