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SUMMARY:Black holes\, galaxies and the Nobel Prize - Professor	Roger Davie
 s\, University of Oxford
DTSTART:20220125T193000Z
DTEND:20220125T204500Z
UID:TALK168920@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Xuchen Wang
DESCRIPTION:*Talk Abstract*\n\nRoger Penrose postulated the existence of b
 lack holes as a consequence of General Relativity they and they were first
  discovered in X-ray emitting binary stars. From the end of the 1960s blac
 k holes were hypothesised to be the driving energy source for active galac
 tic nuclei but their important role in galaxy evolution has only recently 
 been appreciated. The talk will present this story leading up to the first
  image of the shadow of a supermassive black hole in M87 and the unequivoc
 al detection a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way for which the 202
 0 Nobel Prize was awarded. I will close by asking – why did this take so
  long?\n\n---\n\n*Speaker Information*\n\nProfessor Roger Davies is the fi
 rst holder of Philip Wetton Chair in Astrophysics and a Student of Christ 
 Church College\, University of Cambridge. His research interests centre on
  cosmology and how galaxies form and evolve. He has a longstanding interes
 t in astronomical instruments and telescopes. Since 2014 he has been the f
 ounding Director of the Oxford Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys. \n
 \nProfessor Roger Davies grew up in Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire and a
 ttended John Leggott School. He read Physics as an undergraduate at UCL an
 d did a PhD at the Institute of Astronomy and Churchill College\, Cambridg
 e. Following that he moved to the United States working at the Kitt Peak N
 ational Observatory in Tucson\, AZ\, now part of NSF's NOIRLab. He became 
 part of the Seven Samurai collaboration which surveyed the distances and v
 elocities of galaxies\, discovering the `Great Attractor’\, a concentrat
 ion of galaxy clusters pulling the Milky Way in the direction of the const
 ellations of Hydra and Centaurus. \n\nHe moved to Oxford in 1988 to lead t
 he team set up to build a UK 8m telescope that ultimately resulted in thei
 r membership of the Gemini Observatory. Since then he has been project sci
 entist for a number of instruments. He became Head of Astronomy at Durham 
 University in 1994\, returning to Oxford to the Wetton Chair in 2002. He h
 as pioneered the use of a new class of astronomical spectrograph to measur
 e the masses and ages of galaxies\, as well as search for black holes in t
 heir nuclei.\n\nHe was Head of the Physics Department at Oxford from 2005-
 10 and Head of Astrophysics from 2011-14. He is a Fellow of UCL and hold a
 n honorary degree from University Claude Bernard in Lyon\, France. He was 
 President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2010 and 2012\, and ha
 s been President of the European Astronomical Society since 2017. He was e
 lected to the AURA Board of Directors in 2021.
LOCATION:Delivered online via Zoom
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