CAREER: Echo Mapping the Census of Supermassive Black Hole Mass, Accretion, and Spin

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

This program will compile a census of supermassive black holes in the universe. Essentially every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole in its center. The program will use a new generation of time-domain observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to map the fundamental black hole properties of mass, spin, and accretion. This will give insights into how supermassive black holes and galaxies evolve across cosmic time. The PI will develop a “bridge program” for underrepresented minority undergraduate physics majors at the University of Connecticut to increase their number in STEM fields by completing their education. A census of supermassive black hole will be made using spectroscopic and photometric Reverberation Mapping (RM) in a series of time domain campaigns with massively multiplexed spectroscopy to measure their mass and accretion disks by first using the SDSS-RM survey. Techniques will be developed to construct contemporaneous UV-optical spectral energy distributions that avoid the effects of quasar variability which together with the full SDSS-RM sample with black hole masses will be the first to determine a large number of black hole spin masses. Future matched UV photometry together with time domain optical LSST data for spin measurements with the SDSS-V survey will result in a census of the black hole population and characteristics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.