Distinguished Colloquium Series: Physics & Astronomy – Anil Seth

About the event

The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites all to a Distinguished Colloquium featuring Dr. Anil Seth, Department Physics & Astronomy, University of Utah. Dr. Seth will present his talk, “Small Galaxies, Big Black Holes”, Tuesday, March 6 at 4:10 p.m. in Webster 17.

Please meet our guest speaker at a reception to follow, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. in the foyer on floor G above the lecture hall

Abstract
Supermassive black holes are ubiquitous in massive galaxies, but it remains unclear how many sub-Milky Way mass galaxies host black holes at their centers. If they exist, the central black holes in these galaxies will make up a majority of the massive black holes in the local Universe. The demographics of central black holes in lower mass galaxies also provide the only currently observable test of how supermassive black holes form in the early universe. I will discuss my group’s discoveries of black holes in nearby nuclear star clusters and ultracompact dwarf galaxies using adaptive optics kinematics observations, including the first dynamical measurements of central BHs with masses below one million solar masses.

Biography
Anil Seth was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics, Astronomy & Music from Wesleyan University, and a PhD in astronomy from University of Washington, Seattle. He subsequently spent five years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before being appointed assistant professor in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah in 2011. He was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2017. He studies the formation and evolution of nearby galaxies by detecting individual stars and clusters of stars whose ages, composition, and motions can be measured. His particular focus is on understanding the centers of galaxies and the black holes and massive star clusters we find there.