This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dr. Begelman will study the formation and growth of the most massive black holes in the cosmos. These are the powerhouses for the luminous active nuclei that are found at the centers of luminous galaxies. The black holes must grow rapidly, since luminous quasars were already shining less than two billion years after the Big Bang. With a postdoctoral researcher, he will explore a fairly detailed picture for how massive black holes could be born. Gas rapidly falling inward first forms a gravitationally bound core, which is then compressed by the weight of the outer layers of gas. This structure collapses (due to thermal neutrino losses) to form a black hole surrounded by an envelope of gas, from which material continues to fall in. The team will examine the structure of these objects using one-dimensional stellar evolution calculations, and use the hydrodynamic code ZEUS to study how the pressure of radiation from material falling onto the black hole blows away the gas enveloping the black hole.
Dr Begelman plans to prepare a second edition of his 1996 popular book 'Gravity's Fatal Attraction' (with Martin Rees) which will incorporate results from this research, and write an instructor's guide to make the book useful as a text for undergraduate survey courses. He will develop a planetarium show on how black holes shape the growth of galaxies, to be presented to the public and K-12 school groups at U. Colorado's Fiske Planetarium. A postdoctoral researcher will be trained by participation in the research.
