Seminar: Dr. Haocheng Zhang | UMBC/CRESST II/NASA GSFC
In-Person PHYS 401
Wednesday, September 4, 2024 · 11 AM - 12 PM
TITLE: "Relativistic Jets From Supermassive Black Holes: The Cosmic Hadron Collider”
ABSTRACT: Supermassive black holes live in the center of galaxies. While most of them are rather quiet just like the one in our Milky Way, a small number can launch a relativist plasma jet into the universe.
These jets carry a tremendous amount of energy and can strongly affect the nearby cosmic environment, playing a central role in many research areas in modern astronomy.
This talk will focus on their potential to produce very high energy cosmic rays. These particles can reach such high energy that is millions of times more energetic than the particles created in the Large Hadron Collider.
They can collide and interact with photons in the jet, contributing to neutrinos that are bombarding the Earth, making all kinds of other high energy particles, and shedding light on the very basic rules of physics.
All these interesting topics gain relativistic jets a lot of research interests, and we will walk through the state of the art theoretical and observational efforts in this area.
At the end of the talk we will discuss new astronomical missions and techniques that are being developed to study these intriguing astrophysical systems.
ABSTRACT: Supermassive black holes live in the center of galaxies. While most of them are rather quiet just like the one in our Milky Way, a small number can launch a relativist plasma jet into the universe.
These jets carry a tremendous amount of energy and can strongly affect the nearby cosmic environment, playing a central role in many research areas in modern astronomy.
This talk will focus on their potential to produce very high energy cosmic rays. These particles can reach such high energy that is millions of times more energetic than the particles created in the Large Hadron Collider.
They can collide and interact with photons in the jet, contributing to neutrinos that are bombarding the Earth, making all kinds of other high energy particles, and shedding light on the very basic rules of physics.
All these interesting topics gain relativistic jets a lot of research interests, and we will walk through the state of the art theoretical and observational efforts in this area.
At the end of the talk we will discuss new astronomical missions and techniques that are being developed to study these intriguing astrophysical systems.
