Natalie Webb
Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (Toulouse, France)
To understand the origin and the growth of supermassive black holes, it is necessary to search for and determine the population of seed, or intermediate mass black holes (IMBH), and identify where they reside, which can provide clues on their origin and study how they evolve. Understanding the physical mechanism behind prolonged super-Eddington accretion will also allow us to understand the black hole growth. Studying X-ray sources can give us insight into these questions. During this seminar I will introduce the XMM-Newton catalogue, 4XMM, and new methodology that is being put into place that allows us to identify new transients, which is one way to identify tidal disruption events that house IMBH and highly variable ultra-luminous X-ray sources which give us insight into super-Eddington accretion. I will show some of the results achieved to date and discuss what can be done in the future to finally understand the growth of supermassive black holes.
Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris