Astrophysical Black Holes

Astrophysicists have discovered two populations of black holes in the universe: stellar-mass black holes with masses in the range 5 to 20 solar masses, and supermassive black holes with masses in the range million to several billion solar masses. According to the general theory of relativity, each black hole is completely described with just two parameters: its mass and its spin. Measuring these two parameters for individual black holes and relating the measured values to specific observational manifestations of the holes is a major area of research. The talk will review some recent progress in this field.  

 

About Prof. Ramesh Narayan :

Professor Ramesh Narayan is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University. He received his PhD from Bangalore University and after spending few years at the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, he went to Caltech as a Senior Research Fellow. He then joined the faculty at the University of Arizona and later moved to Harvard University in 1991.

Prof. Ramesh Narayan has made outstanding and key contributions in a number of areas of theoretical astrophysics, including accretion disks, gravitational lensing, gamma-ray bursts, neutron stars and black holes. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.