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IR STIG Seminar

Infrared Science and Technology Interest Group

IR STIG about IR STIG Seminar

Location

Virtual

Dates

27 April 2026
12:00pm ET/ 9:00am PT

Community

IR STIG

Type

Seminar

Supermassive Black Hole and Galaxy Co-Evolution with PRIMA 

Speaker

Jed McKinney (University of Texas, Austin)

Abstract

Galaxies have grown their stars and central supermassive black holes by orders of magnitude over the last ~10 billion years. Both of these processes, star formation and black hole accretion, compete for the same resources to grow: cold gas. Moreover, bursts in star formation and black hole growth are among the most energetic events that galaxies experience, depositing significant amounts of energy into the gas as a source of feedback. This balance between positive and negative feedback effects is highly complex. As a result, most simulations predict different paths for how stars and supermassive black holes grow in tandem. Adding to this problem is the fact that galaxies are heavily obscured by dust, making it difficult to disentangle star formation and black hole growth with current observatories. Enter PRIMA, a 1.8m next-generation far-infrared, cryogenically cooled space observatory operating between 24-235um. In this community P-CAST talk I will present an overview of PRIMA’s PI science goals for addressing the co-evolution of stars and black holes in galaxies. PRIMA will pierce the dust-obscured veils of galaxies out to z~2 to photometrically and spectroscopically separate signatures of star formation and supermassive black hole accretion for statistical samples. This will provide unprecedented empirical constraint the most important drivers of galaxy formation. 

Seminar Connection

Please visit the P-CAST webpage https://prima.ipac.caltech.edu/page/p-cast for a link to join and to see all of our upcoming speakers! 

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Angled from the upper left corner to the lower right corner is a cone-shaped orange-red cloud known as Herbig-Haro 49/50. This feature takes up about three-fourths of the length of this angle. The upper left end of this feature has a translucent, rounded end. The conical feature widens slightly from the rounded end at the upper right down to the lower right. Along the cone there are additional rounded edges, like edges of a wave, and intricate foamy-like details, as well as a clearer view of the black background of space. In the upper left, overlapping with the rounded end of Herbig-Haro 49/50, is a background spiral galaxy with a concentrated blue center that fades outward to blend with red spiral arms. The background of space is speckled with some white stars and smaller, more numerous, fainter white galaxies throughout.