Events at Physics |
Events on Thursday, April 9th, 2015
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Digging for buried Quasars with WISE and Planck
- Time: 3:45 pm - 5:00 pm
- Place: 4421 Sterling Hall(Coffee and Cookies at 3:30 PM)
- Speaker: Mike Di Pompeo, University of Wyoming
- Abstract: Around 50% of quasars are hidden behind clouds of gas and dust, obscuring them from view in many wavebands. However, the structure and scale of this obscuring material is poorly understood. Studying this population is critical to understanding the cosmic history of black hole growth and the mutual evolution of quasars and their host galaxies. Obscured quasars are efficiently identified in the infrared, allowing the all-sky nature of WISE to select large samples of this subclass for the first time. I will present measurements of the dark matter halo masses of WISE-selected obscured quasars, as a proxy for their environment, from two independent methods: the angular autocorrelation function and a cross-correlation of the quasar density with lensing maps of the CMB from Planck. These measurements provide critical insight into this important population of quasars. <br>