Paola Rodriguez Hidalgo from the University of Washington Bothell will be the featured speaker at an upcoming Department of Physics and Astronomy colloquium. Her talk is titled, "(Extremely!) High Velocity Outflows in Quasars."

Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the sky. These very energetic regions lie at the center of massive galaxies and are powered by a super-massive black hole. While it has been found that there is a correlation between the mass of these super-massive black holes and the mass of the surrounding galaxies, the co-evolution of galaxies and quasars is barely understood. Outflows launched from the vicinity of super-massive black holes are a key piece in this puzzle, potentially linking the small and the large-scale phenomena. Rodriguez Hidalgo has discovered that some of this gas is outflowing at very high speeds (up to 216 million km/hr, 20% of the speed of light!). To better characterize the frequency and properties of these outflows, her group is conducting an encompassing multi-wavelength studyusing data from, among others, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. All these results have implications for current theoretical models and will help us better understand the quasar phenomenon and their environments.