Understanding the physical properties, initial seeds, formation mechanisms and growth phases of supermassive black holes presents one of the major challenges of modern astrophysics. Ubiquitously residing at the center of nearly every galaxy, supermassive black holes regulate the evolution of their host galaxies, inject energy into the surrounding intergalactic gas, and play a pivotal role in shaping entire Galactic ecosystems over cosmic time. Some of the questions our group aims to answer are: How and when did the first massive black holes form? How do they grow and where does the fueling material for their growth come from? On which timescales does this growth happen and what does this tell us about the physics of the process? How do the galaxies that host supermassive black holes look like and how do the black holes shape their environments? What influence do they have on galaxy evolution across our cosmic history? And how can we use quasars and galaxies to constrain the cosmology of our universe?
We study these supermassive black holes and their evolution with the galaxies that host them using data from some of the largest ground- and space-based observatories, such as for example the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Euclid Space Telescope, or the Magellan Telescopes located in the Atacama desert in Chile and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. We combine multi-wavelength observational data with new machine learning algorithms, time-domain studies, and cosmological simulations to paint a coherent picture of black hole growth over cosmic time - from the Cosmic Dawn of our universe to the present day.
If you'd like to know more about our group's research, please take a look at our recent News, our group's ADS library and GitHub page, or just reach out to us.