McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics

Physical Society Colloquium

Interview for Faculty Position

X-Ray Spectroscopy of Accretion-Powered Cosmic Sources

Masao Sako

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

The high-resolution grating spectrometers onboard the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories have provided us, for the first time, with a detailed physical view of hot X-ray emitting gas in essentially all classes of astronomical sources. I will show some recent results from observations of accretion-powered sources, ranging from stellar-mass neutron star X-ray binaries to galaxies that harbor supermassive black holes, and show how X-ray spectroscopy can be used to understand the nature of the circumsource medium. I will also discuss a few examples where the newly acquired X-ray spectra are challenging our conventional understanding of the physical conditions in these systems.

Thursday, February 19th, 16:00
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, R.E. Bell Conference Room (room 103)