Speaker
Scott Tremaine
(Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Description
The massive black holes found at the centers of many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are believed to be the ashes of the fuel that powered quasars early in the life of universe. I will review the astronomical evidence for these objects and describe some of the exotic dynamical phenomena that originate in their vicinity, including hypervelocity stars, resonant dynamical relaxation, phase transitions, and lopsided stellar disks.