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Xiamen-Cardiff Seminar

Black Hole Binary Census in the Milky Way Galaxy

Speaker: Jianfeng Wu (Xiamen University)
Date: Friday 5 November 2021
Time: 9:30 in UK
Venue: Zoom

There are a few dozens of black hole binaries and candidates identified to date in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, which only occupies a tiny fraction of the predicted stellar-mass black hole population. In this talk, I will first discuss how to reliably measure the black hole mass in low-mass X-ray binaries, taking Nova Muscae 1991 as a case study. Then I will talk about issues in the mass distribution of black holes (i.e., the mass gap), and potential biases in current way of identifying black hole binaries. The last part of the talk is about the survey projects I have been involved in, aiming to discover more types of black hole binaries in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Short bio: Prof. Jianfeng Wu received his PhD degree in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the Pennsylvania State University (2012) and worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Research fellow at the University of Michigan. His research interest is mainly focused on observational black hole astrophysics across the mass scale, including black hole binaries, active galactic nuclei, etc.