Roger Blandford, Stanford University
When
Refreshments served at 1:30 pm in the 3rd Floor Atrium
TAP Gravity Initiative Lecture
Roger Blandford, Stanford University
Title: Black Hole Binaries, Large and Small
Abstract: Massive black holes have long been identified as the prime movers of Active Galactic Nuclei. Binary Black Holes are a natural expectation of galaxy mergers but have been elusive until recent reports of a nHz gravitational wave background and periodic variation in long term radio monitoring. Small black holes, with stellar companions, are now being recognized as Very High Energy Sources, exemplified by SS433. They have also been discovered in abundance as merging black holes by LIGO, pointing to a hierarchical evolution. These two avenues of discovery will be drawn together in a speculative cosmogony of Little Red Dots.
Bio: Roger Blandford took his BA, MA and PhD degrees at Cambridge University. Following postdoctoral research at Cambridge, Princeton and Berkeley he took up a faculty position at Caltech in 1976 where he was appointed as the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics in 1989. In 2003 He moved to Stanford University to become the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and the Luke Blossom Chair in the School of Humanities and Science. He is currently the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources. He co-authored with Kip Thorne the textbook Modern Classical Physics. His research interests include neutron star and black hole astrophysics, cosmic rays, cosmology, gravitational lensing, and astrobiology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008-2010, he chaired a two year National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was awarded the 1998 Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the 2013 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the 2016 Crafoord Prize for Astronomy and the 2020 Shaw Prize for Astronomy.