施勇 (西湖大学)
Abstract:
Intermediate-mass black holes are thought to be the seeds of the supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies. Many of these smaller black holes may wander far from galactic centers, but how they grow in such environments remains largely unknown. Theory predicts that a wandering black hole moving through interstellar gas can gravitationally focus the surrounding gas into a dense wake behind it and feed from this wake, but direct observational evidence has been lacking. In this talk I will present a summary of our search for massive black holes in the Dwarf Galaxy Integral-field Survey (DGIS), and then focus on the discovery of a wandering 35,000-solar-mass black hole accreting through a gravitational wake.
Biography:
Shi Yong is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at Westlake University. His main research interests are galaxy formation and evolution, massive black holes, and cosmology. He received his bachelor's degree from the Department of Astronomy at Peking University in 2003 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. From 2008 to 2009, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona. From 2009 to 2013, he was a postdoctor at the California Institute of Technology. From 2013 to 2025, he was a professor at Nanjing University. In 2025, he joined the Westlake University. He received awards including the National Youth Thousand Talents Program, the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and Tencent Xplorer Prize.
