Architekten des Universums - Erforschung der Rolle supermassereicher schwarzer Löcher in der Galaxienentwicklung mit dem James Webb Space Telescope

Abstract

Supermassive black holes are some of the most mysterious objects that astronomers have tried to understand ever since Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s field equations in 1916 – 106 years ago. We know today, that every massive galaxy in the Universe hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. The most popular example is the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. In 2020, a part of the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for its discovery and confirmation.

But maybe even more intriguingly, the energy output from rapidly growing supermassive black holes is now widely considered to be the the main driver in regulating the evolution of galaxies in the Universe and has become a major component in modern galaxy formation theories. Rapidly growing supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are called Active Galactic Nuclei, or short: AGN. The critical role of AGN in galaxy evolution was already hypothesised two decades ago but specific observational evidence has been surprisingly hard to come by. Constraining the power and reach of such feedback processes exerted by black holes onto their host galaxies remains a major unresolved issue in modern extragalactic astrophysics. Addressing and resolving these questions is the goal of this project.