Alison Kirkpatrick: The Secret Lives of Galaxies
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At the heart of nearly every galaxy lurks a black hole millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Surrounding each galaxy is a vast halo of dark matter that outweighs all of its stars, gas, and dust combined. We can’t see either one, yet together they have shaped everything we can see.
In this talk, Allison Kirkpatrick ’16 PhD will take you on a 13-billion-year journey through the life cycle of a galaxy, told through X-ray, optical, and infrared light and illuminated by her own observations with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Beginning near the dawn of time when dark matter created the scaffolding for the first galaxies and the first giant black holes somehow sprang into existence, the story will follow those young galaxies as they grow and evolve, settling into graceful spirals during a cosmic boom that produced most of the stars in the universe. Along the way, galaxies will collide, fueling black holes powerful enough to reshape their hosts. Finally, it explores how the story ends: why galaxies stop forming stars and what that means for galaxies like our own Milky Way.