SAVILE SCIENCE – BLACK HOLES & SPIN-OFFS – PROFESSOR KATHERINE BLUNDELL OBE. CHAIRMAN – SAVILIAN CLIFF COLLIS.

The popular notion of a black hole “sucking in everything” from its surroundings only happens very close to a black hole. Far away, the pull of the black hole is identical to that of anything else of the same mass. However, black holes do give rise to many remarkable phenomena such as extragalactic quasars and, in our own Galaxy, microquasars. This is because gravity is not the only law of physics that must be obeyed. Matter can be spun off from near black holes in the form of winds and jets that spread through their surroundings and thus cause black holes to have tremendous cosmic influence many light years beyond their event horizons.  I will describe various approaches that I employ to investigate these phenomena, and their spin-offs. 

 Katherine Blundell OBE is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and Gresham Professor of Astronomy and a Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford.  Her research interests span the evolution of active galaxies and the launch and propagation of relativistic jets from near black holes.   She established the world-wide Global Jet Watch observatories to further research investigations in Time-Domain Astronomy.  She has published over 200 research papers in the specialist literature and books on Concepts in Thermal Physics, Energy for the Future, and Black Holes.  Her awards include a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Astrophysics, the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Medal, the Royal Astronomical Society’s Darwin Lectureship and the Institute of Physics Bragg Medal.