Supermassive black holes, with masses that range from tens of thousands to billions of times the mass of our Sun, are thought to be present in every galaxy in the Universe and can affect the growth and evolution of these galaxies. In order to understand how galaxies evolve, we must therefore understand the role played by supermassive black holes.

To do this, we must have access to accurate measurements of both galaxy properties and supermassive black hole masses across the entire universe. We measure supermassive black hole masses by observing objects called quasars, which have supermassive black holes with large amounts of matter falling into them. In this talk, I will discuss the relationship between supermassive black holes and galaxies and quasars, and how we measure the masses of these cosmic behemoths

Kate Grier is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Astronomy. She grew up in the Chicago area and received her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kate then went on to graduate school to obtain a Ph.D in astronomy from the Ohio State University in 2013. She then served as the Planetarium Director at OSU for a year, and then moved on as a Postdoctoral research fellow at Penn State University in State College. She moved to the University of Arizona in 2018 first as a postdoc, and then as an assistant astronomer. Kate started as an assistant professor at UW-Madison in Fall 2022. Her research focuses primarily on supermassive black holes through observations of the variability of quasars.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.