Public Lecture-Black Holes, the Brightest Objects in the Universe 

Lecture Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2009. Black holes are everywhere in the Universe. They form when massive stars end their life in a simultaneous violent collapse and energetic explosion. Galaxies end up littered with small black holes, each roughly the mass of ten Suns. Nearly every galaxy center ends up with a single huge black hole, with the mass of a million to a billion Suns. During their lifetimes, black holes chew up their surroundings and spew out ultra-energetic beams of radiation and matter that are visible from across the Universe. In this lecture, Prof. Jonathan McKinney discusses how black holes form, outlines how they are detected, and shows movies that illustrate how they work according to Einstein and state-of-the-art computer simulations. We will see that these blackest of all objects in the Universe actually shine the brightest. Lecturer: Prof. Jonathan McKinney, Stanford University.