Seminar: Dr. Yasaman Homayouni | Penn State
In-Person PHYS 401
Location
Physics : 401
Date & Time
September 10, 2025, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Description
TITLE: "Census of Black Hole Accretion Structure and Mass”
ABSTRACT: Reliably measured black hole masses are critical for understanding black hole growth and galaxy evolution over cosmic time. Beyond the local Universe, the gold standard for black hole masses is reverberation mapping. So far, many high-redshift black hole studies have relied on single-epoch mass estimators based on scaling relations between broad-line gas radius and AGN luminosity. But, recent results from the SDSS-RM project show that these single-epoch masses are overestimated by as much as a factor of 10, suggesting that many of our current ideas about early black hole formation and growth should be revised. SDSS-V/Black Hole Mapper is an industrial scale, time-domain spectroscopic survey that is anticipated to monitor > 1000 quasars up to z~3. In this talk, I will describe how we will obtain reliable black hole masses from SDSS-V/BHM survey and LSST.
ABSTRACT: Reliably measured black hole masses are critical for understanding black hole growth and galaxy evolution over cosmic time. Beyond the local Universe, the gold standard for black hole masses is reverberation mapping. So far, many high-redshift black hole studies have relied on single-epoch mass estimators based on scaling relations between broad-line gas radius and AGN luminosity. But, recent results from the SDSS-RM project show that these single-epoch masses are overestimated by as much as a factor of 10, suggesting that many of our current ideas about early black hole formation and growth should be revised. SDSS-V/Black Hole Mapper is an industrial scale, time-domain spectroscopic survey that is anticipated to monitor > 1000 quasars up to z~3. In this talk, I will describe how we will obtain reliable black hole masses from SDSS-V/BHM survey and LSST.
