The Secret Lives of Galaxies: Allison Kirkpatrick,'16PhD:

At the heart of nearly every galaxy lurks a black hole millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Surrounding each galaxy is a vast halo of dark matter that outweighs all of its stars, gas, and dust combined. We can’t see either one, yet together they have shaped everything we can see.

In this talk, Allison Kirkpatrick ’16PhD, will take you on a 13-billion-year journey through the life cycle of a galaxy, told through X-ray, optical, and infrared light and illuminated by her own observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. Beginning near the dawn of time when dark matter created the scaffolding for the first galaxies and the first giant black holes somehow sprang into existence, the story will follow those young galaxies as they grow and evolve, settling into graceful spirals during a cosmic boom that produced most of the stars in the universe. Along the way, galaxies will collide, fueling black holes powerful enough to reshape their hosts. Finally, it explores how the story ends: why galaxies stop forming stars and what that means for galaxies like our own Milky Way.

Allison Kirkpatrick, '16PhD, is a leading expert in measuring the impact of supermassive black holes on galaxies over the age of the universe. She observes galaxies with NASA's premier space telescopes and played a leading role in the collaboration that took the first observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. She now leads her own JWST observing program, MEGA, which is revealing whether the mysterious little red dots are growing black holes, as well as finding what's hiding behind dust in galaxies 10 billion years in the past. Kirkpatrick earned her PhD at UMass in 2016 and is currently an associate professor at the University of Kansas.