Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC)

The first in our 2026 lecture series kicked off with a sold out event at the College of San Mateo Planetarium

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun. How SMBHs work is one of the key questions in astrophysics because they test the behavior of matter in strong gravitational fields, and their growth is strongly connected to how galaxies themselves evolve. Their X-ray emission can unveil the structure of the SMBH system.