Monster Black Holes, Active Galaxies and Red Quasars

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 24th February 2022 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Virtual Meeting

Quasars are THE brightest known objects in the visible universe. They are so bright that they outshine the entire galaxy they sit in and are useful in all areas of astronomy, especially cosmology where they can be used as a probe for the early Universe.

They are a type of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) which consist of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, surrounded by an extremely bright disc of matter falling onto the black hole. Most quasars appear very blue, but there are some that show much redder colors.

These “red quasars” could be an important link in galaxy evolution and so understanding their properties is very important. In my work, I use high-resolution radio data and optical-near-infrared spectroscopy to explore the differences in red quasars, adding weight to the emerging picture of red quasars being fundamentally different objects.

I will also talk about the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) which has just started its 5-year survey to obtain the spectra of ~30 million galaxies.

Speaker: Victoria Fawcett

I am a final year Ph.D. student at Durham University researching quasars. I did my Masters project at the University of Warwick, where I researched the X-ray irradiation of exoplanets. My research now focuses on dust-reddened quasars and whether they could represent an important phase in the evolution of galaxies.