The goal of the meeting is to explore accretion and feedback from black holes across the mass and accretion rate spectrum, from active galactic nuclei to X-ray binaries, via Tidal Disruption events, seeking similarities, differences and roads to unification. We will take this state of the art understanding and seek to understand how these processes are applied to simulations of galaxy growth and cosmological structure, and identify the most outstanding gaps in our knowledge.
We aim to reach across communities, all of whom have similar goals and astrophysics, but different knowledge. So many of us are working on overlapping and relevant areas but rarely have a chance to speak, such is the pressure to drill down into one's own specialisation.
The meeting draws its name and some of its support from the ERC Synergy Grant 'Blackholistic', which has principal investigators Heino Falcke, Rob Fender and Sera Markoff, the goals of which are to deepen our understanding of the connection between accretion and jet formation in stellar- and super-massive black holes (part of which will be to build the Africa Millimetre Telescope in Namibia to improve the imaging capability of the Event Horizon Telescope).
This meeting is furthermore inspired, and a partial continuation of, a series of meetings in the 'SHIVA' series, which seeks to deepen our understanding of how accretion and jet formation scale across black hole mass and accretion rate, and we are delighted to have two of the core SHIVA members on our SOC. Beyond SHIVA, though, we wish to connect observations of the accretion physics to impact that black hole accretion and feedback has, and has had, as an integrated effect over the life of the universe. Hence the connection to observations of the most mysterious and distant supermassive black holes, and to cosmological simulations.
Beyond a simple, standard, lecture format, we aim to have phases of non-standard activities, to keep the brain alive (more details tbc!) and to conclude each day with a lively (and friendly!) discussion on a key subject e.g. "Is accretion and jet coupling really the same in X-ray binaries and AGN?".
We hope you're interested in joining us.
