Rajib Ganguly on Reverse Engineering the Fine Dining Needs of Black Hole Divas

In the last few decades, astronomy has undergone a remarkable transformation. Previously, we were limited to the technological bounds of what we could observe and then left to ask what those observations could tell us. Now, we are in a position to flip that modus operandi, first asking questions, and then designing experiments to address hypotheses. On a similar timeframe, we made a remarkable discovery that every nearby massive galaxy (including our own) hosts a supermassive black hole at its core. Today, the explosion of discoveries has extended this to our earliest views of the Universe and the youngest of galaxies. This brings forth profound questions regarding how these massive beasts come to be. In this talk, I will discuss some of the possible formation and growth scenarios and clues that we are finding to help narrow the field. Focusing on one important and common aspect of these scenarios, I will present some of the ongoing research being done here at UM-Flint that is engaging our students. These research opportunities involve both big data-driven explorations as well as detailed computer modeling informed by state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics in the extreme Reynolds number regime in the face of strong gravitational and magnetic fields.
Rajib Ganguly is an Associate Professor of Physics at CIT. His research centers on quasars, or super-massive black holes that reside in the center of galaxies. He combines empirical and theoretical approaches using data from a wide variety of telescopes (including the Hubble Space Telescope) and computer simulations. Prior to joining the University of Michigan-Flint, he was with the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Wyoming, and postdoc at the AGN Research Group.