research

RESEARCH NEWS

Feeding supermassive black holes

Credits: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

'An increase in black hole activity in galaxies with kinematically misaligned gas'

Together with my collaborators from the University of Copenhagen and UCLA, we found the first observational evidence that galaxies with misaligned gas have a higher fraction of active supermassive black holes.

Misaligned gas is a signature of a past galaxy interaction and therefore our findings connect the gas acquired during galaxy interactions with the fuelling of the supermassive black hole.

For our study we use observations of more than 3000 galaxies from the SAMI survey.

Our research was published in Nature Astronomy  and covered by the University of Southampton news team and the press (e.g. Phys.org, ScienceDaily, Space.com).

intermediate mass black holes

Credits: Midjourney

'A fast-rising tidal disruption event from a candidate intermediate-mass black hole'

A star that was disrupted by the gravitational influence of a black hole allowed us to identify one of the elusive intermediate mass black holes, with a mass of 104.7 – 105.9 times the mass of our Sun. 

The discovery led by Dr. Charlotte Angus of the Niels Bohr Institute in collaboration with our Young Supernova Experiment team, used the detection of a transient event (a tidal disruption event) to study the properties of the black hole.

Our results were published in Nature Astronomy and covered in Space.com.

The fact that we were able to capture this midsize black hole whilst it devoured a star offered us a remarkable opportunity to detect what otherwise would have been hidden from us.

Dr. Charlotte Angus

Research Interests

My main research interests are on supermassive black holes, Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and their host galaxies. I am particularly interested in black hole accretion physics, gas dynamics, AGN fuelling and galaxy evolution. I am also interested in black hole transients and time domain astrophysics as a part of the Young Supernova Experiment survey.


Selection of first-author articles by topic

1) Gas dynamics in the AGN broad line region

2) Counter-rotation and AGN fuelling

3) Changing-look AGN

4) Black hole accretion physics

 

My full list of publications can be found here