Two talks are scheduled for Tuesday, September 11:

A Brief History of the Galactic Center Supermassive Black Hole Sgr A*

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) may spend the majority of their lives accreting at low rates through radiatively inefficient, advection-dominated accretion flow. Therefore, low-luminosity SMBHs could greatly outnumber their more active cousins, the active galactic nuclei (AGN), thus are essential for our understanding of SMBH activity cycles and their relationship to galaxy evolution. In particular, SMBHs harbored at...

Winning the Nobel Prize would cap most physicists’ careers. For 2017 winner Rainer Weiss, the prize might not even have been the biggest moment of his year.

The 85-year-old professor emeritus at MIT shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for conceiving and shepherding a set of observatories that allowed scientists to prove Einstein’s assertion about gravitational waves: accelerating objects send ripples cascading through the universe at light speed. The invisible waves are so faint that even the most powerful distort space-time by less than the width of a human...

Blafoje Oblak

ETH Zurich

​Abstract:

This talk is devoted to Berry phases that appear in the context of asymptotic symmetries in general relativity. These phases arise when a coherent state is acted upon by symmetry transformations that trace a closed path in...

Delilah Gates

Harvard Physics

"Polarization Whorls from High-Spin Black Holes "

Abstract

We consider electromagnetic emissions from the near-horizon region of a high-spin black hole. Assuming the source polarization respects the spacetime symmetries, we analytically compute the polarization profile measured by a distant observer. The universal constraints we obtain are a new example of critical behavior in astronomy that could be observed at the Event Horizon Telescope....