Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

We believe that supermassive black holes reside at the center of massive galaxies, where they can shine as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) when supplied with gas to accrete.  These black holes are believed to be important for regulating gas cooling in massive galaxies via "AGN feedback," whose details are poorly understood.  The problems of supermassive black hole growth and feedback span many orders of magnitude in both spatial and temporal scale, an intractable problem for a single simulation.  In this seminar, I will discuss my theoretical work spanning this range in spatial scales: from modeling AGN central engines for the Event Horizon Telescope, to studies of the black hole-galaxy co-evolution with the Romulus cosmological simulations.  These studies help stitch together properties of AGN central engines and how they are connected to their host galaxies.