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Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Mississippi

Events

Event Information:

  • Thu
    06
    Feb
    2020

    Colloquium: Supermassive Black Hole Feedback in the Centers of Massive Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters

    4:00 pmLewis Hall 101

    Yuan Li
    Department of Astronomy
    University of California — Berkeley

    Supermassive Black Hole Feedback in the Centers of Massive Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters

    The centers of massive galaxies and galaxy clusters contain hot plasma that loses its energy rapidly through radiation of X-ray photons. The energy loss is thought to be compensated for by the energy input from the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the centers of these systems, via a process often termed as "AGN feedback". In this talk, I will review the state of the field, and discuss what we have learned from numerical simulations in the past few years, including how AGN jets deposit their energy to the surrounding medium, and how they affect cooling and star formation. I will also talk about my recent analysis of optical and ALMA observations of multiphase filaments in cluster centers, which not only improves our understanding of AGN feedback, but also puts unprecedented constraints on microscopic transport processes in the weakly-collisional, magnetized intracluster plasma.