Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation

  • Home
  • News
    • Positions available
    • PhD Studentships at the ICG
    • Fellowships at the ICG
  • ICG Members
  • For The Public
    • New to Cosmology?
    • Upcoming Events
    • Schools Outreach
    • Outreach Resources
      • Cosmic Stroll
    • Research Experience
    • Athena SWAN @ ICG
    • Dignity & Respect
  • Research Overview
  • Talks, Lectures, Meetings
    • Colloquia
    • Lunchtime Meetings
    • Theoretical Cosmology
    • Lectures
    • Galaxy Breakfast
    • LSS Meetings
    • Lensing Meetings
    • Gravity Meetings
    • UoP Workshops
    • Science Chat
    • GRADnet
  • Study With Us
    • Physics@Portsmouth
    • SEPnet
    • DISCnet
  • Contact Us

Tyrone Woods (Birmingham), Titans of the Early Universe: The Origin of the Most Massive High-z Quasars

September 18, 2018 By Daniel Whalen


Event Details

  • Date: October 11, 2018 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
  • Categories: Seminar

The discovery of billion solar mass quasars at redshifts of 6-7 challenges our understanding of the early Universe; how did such massive objects form in the first billion years? Observational constraints and numerical simulations increasingly favour the “direct collapse” scenario. In this case, an atomically-cooled halo of primordial composition accretes rapidly onto a single protostellar core, ultimately collapsing through the Chandrasekhar-Feynman instability to produce a supermassive (~100,000 solar mass) “seed” black hole. In this talk, I’ll present a systematic study of the lives and deaths of these objects, using the 1D implicit hydrodynamics and stellar evolution code KEPLER. We include post-Newtonian corrections to gravity and a detailed treatment of nuclear burning processes using an adaptive network. We find a simple relation between the infall rate and the final mass at collapse, and rule out the existence of rapidly-rotating supermassive stars. I’ll also discuss the possibility of early chemical enrichment from these objects, observational prospects in the era of the JWST, and briefly summarize other future directions agreed upon at our workshop “Titans of the Early Universe” held at the Monash Prato Centre in Italy, in November of last year.


Event Details

  • Date: October 11, 2018 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
  • Categories: Seminar

promo-button-public1promo-button-partners11promo-button-members1

Fellowships and studentships

  • Fellowships at the ICG
  • PhD Studentships at the ICG

Vacancies

  • Supernova | The MIT Press
  • Research Fellow in Cosmology
  • Dennis Sciama Postdoctoral Research Fellow
  • Professor at the ICG
  • Research Fellow in Gravitational-Wave Astrophysics

Latest News

  • Claudia Maraston | Sitting on the dock of the Universe
  • Podcast: The Hubble space Telescope
  • Cosmologists win award for making astronomy accessible to vision-impaired children
  • Helping blind people to hear the Universe
  • New source of gravitational waves discovered

Coming up

  • Theoretical cosmology: Dong-Gang Wang (Cambridge) on March 29, 2023 2:00 pm
  • Theoretical cosmology: Lorenzo Pizzuti (Czech Academy of Sciences) on April 26, 2023 1:00 pm
  • Theoretical cosmology: Ian Hawke (Southampton) on May 3, 2023 1:00 pm
  • Theoretical Cosmology: Tays Miranda de Andrade (Jyväskylä) on May 10, 2023 1:00 pm
  • Theoretical Cosmology: Sravan Kumar (ICG) on May 17, 2023 1:00 pm

Quick Links

  • How to get to the ICG
  • Upcoming Events
  • Additional Links

Twitter

Tweets by @UoPCosmology

Facebook

Design by FingerprintDigitalMedia.com
Copyright © 2023 ICG, Portsmouth

Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation Cookies Policy

Our Website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please visit our Cookies and privacy page for more information about cookies and how we use them.

Close