Quasars: How do we know what we know?
Date:
Quasars are the most enigmatic yet elegant beasts of the universe. Their nature is aptly captured by the phrase “They are the fire-breathing, bat-winged, vampire, rainbow, zebra unicorns of Astrophysics” by Matt O’Dowd. Sitting at distances reflecting the dawn of time, they are the farthest known objects in the Cosmos. With a super-massive blackhole lurking in their cores engulfing a hyper-heated accretion disk and spewing humongous jets of plasma, they were the primordial slayers of galaxies and aided vita genesis.
But what betrays all this about an object that looks like a single pixel, even in the JWST images? This talk will focus on how we use the “light”(which is all that we have) to infer all that cool stuff about the QSOs. How do a spectrum and a bunch of numbers on the screen, mixed with the science we learn in our laboratories, tell the tales of these cosmic beacons? How do we know what we know? Join us as we explore the toddler tread of humans piercing the veil of the “Island Universe” into the realm of Quasars.