Speaker
Description
Characterizing the initial seeds and early growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) remains one of the central challenges in modern cosmology. In this talk, I will present a new, multi-faceted view of this population, leveraging JWST spectroscopy, strong gravitational lensing, and time-domain approaches.
This includes the direct detection of low-mass black holes extending down to the intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) regime in the early universe, their possible connection to direct-collapse origins and evolutionary pathways toward SDSS-class SMBHs (>10⁸ M☉) at z > 6, evidence for variability on century-long timescales inferred through time-delay analysis in strongly lensed systems, and the capture of a tidal disruption event (TDE) during the epoch of reionization. Together, these observations provide a coherent framework for tracing the formation, growth, and observational signatures of the first black holes across cosmic time.
