Speaker: Charlotte Alison Ward (Univ. of Maryland at College Park)

Title: Using The Zwicky Transient Facility and Vera C. Rubin Observatory To Study Black Hole Seeds, Discover High-Z Quasars, and Measure Time Delays From Lensed Supernovae

Abstract:

Over the last 3 years, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has demonstrated the potential of wide-field transient surveys for the discovery of black hole populations which trace the formation of the first BH seeds and their merger-driven growth. For instance, our search for off-nuclear AGN in ZTF revealed 9 supermassive black holes (SMBHs) which may have been ejected from their host galaxy by gravitational wave recoil from SMBH mergers with misaligned spins. Likewise, our search for faintly variable intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) in dwarf galaxies with ZTF and WISE found 200 new IMBH candidates, most of which could not have been found via their spectroscopic or multi-wavelength signatures. We found these rare BH populations by using the latest techniques in forward modeling to improve photometric sensitivity, resolve blended sources and measure the separations between variable objects and their host galaxies. Our work is an exciting precursor to the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which we expect to detect large populations of recoiling SMBHs, IMBH candidates, and high-z quasars—especially when combined with large spectroscopic surveys. LSST is also predicted to find thousands of strongly gravitationally lensed, multiply-imaged supernovae, and application of the forward modeling techniques we previously demonstrated for ZTF will enable improved measurements of the Hubble constant.