Black holes and spin offs

The 2010 Rosalind Franklin lecture will be given by Professor Katherine Blundell on black holes and their effects.

The popular notion of a black hole "sucking in everything" from its surroundings only happens very close to a black hole. Far away, the pull of the black hole is identical to that of anything else of the same mass. However, black holes do give rise to many remarkable phenomena such as extragalactic quasars and, in our own Galaxy, microquasars. This is because gravity is not the only law of physics that must be obeyed. Matter can be spun off from near black holes in the form of winds and jets that spread through their surroundings and thus cause black holes to have tremendous cosmic influence many light years beyond their event horizons.

Professor Katherine Blundell is Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University, a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a Science Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. She was previously a Research Fellow of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and also a Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Her reserach interests include relativistic jets, astrophysical plasmas, evolution of quasars and microquasars. She has written several books including Concepts in Thermal Physics and is project leader of Global Jet Watch.

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