Some galaxies shoot out jets of energy so massive, they stretch beyond the galaxy itself — all from black holes millions of times heavier than the Sun. But are these jets stable, or do they flicker over time? And what does that tell us about how galaxies grow and change?

Join Oxford astrophysicist Emma Elley as she explores how these cosmic jets form, evolve, and what they reveal about the universe’s most powerful forces.

Talk Description:
Supermassive black holes are found at the centre of most galaxies. They can be around 100 million times as massive as the sun and can form jets that we can see with radio telescopes. The jets can grow to be larger than the galaxy itself and can be challenging to model and understand. In this talk we’ll look at some of the classic examples of radio galaxy jets and talk about how we can try to understand more about how they develop over their millions of year lifetimes. By understanding whether the power of the jets is flickering we can hope to understand more about how material travels towards the centre of the galaxies, how they impact their surroundings and how old they really are.

Speaker Bio:
Emma Elley is a third-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford, studying particle acceleration in black hole jets. She combines hydrodynamic simulations with models for particle acceleration, cooling and emission to understand better how jets from supermassive black holes might look if they were formed in a particular way. She is interested in understanding how we can use radio surveys to better understand accretion onto supermassive black holes across millions of years. She also works on particle acceleration in X-ray binary systems.