Jets, Flares and Lightning Near the Event Horizon
- Speaker
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Sasha Philippov, Ph.D.Associate Research Scientist, Compact Objects, CCA, Flatiron Institute
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Supermassive black holes in some active galaxies’ centers create powerful jets of radiation and plasma particles that move close to the speed of light. The answers to the questions “how exactly are jets powered by energy extraction from a black hole” and “what are the processes that energize plasma particles” are crucial to understanding the observed activity. Recent years opened new spectacular observational windows into studying plasmas that emit observed light, including multi-wavelength observations of powerful flares and the black hole “shadow” by the Event Horizon Telescope. These exciting discoveries, as well as attempts to improve the understanding of the nature of the curved spacetime, call for a new level of quantitative understanding of plasma dynamics around black holes.
In this lecture, Sasha Philippov will discuss recent progress in first-principles numerical modeling of exciting plasma physics processes that can power jets, flares and lightning from black holes.
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About the Speaker
Philippov received his B.S. in physics from Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology in 2012, and his Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 2017. He started as an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute in 2018, after a year as an Einstein postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Philippov applies numerical techniques to understand the behavior of collisionless plasmas around neutron stars and black holes to explain and predict their observed signatures.