eXtreme Black Holes

March 5 - 10, 2023 | In-Person Conference | #Aspenbh2023

Meeting Rationale

In the spirit of the Aspen X-games, this conference will highlight the astrophysics of “eXtreme black holes”, across the entire mass range from stellar to supermassive, covering a broad variety of environments (interacting binaries, dense star clusters, galactic nuclei), and observable signatures (gravitational waves, very high energy neutrinos, high-resolution imaging, time domain). This conference is a third in a series of Aspen Winter conferences in black hole astrophysics, but with a new focus on the breakthroughs in multi-messenger observations of black holes, and observations and theory that probe the extremes of their demographics.

Many recent discoveries in gravitational wave observations of black hole binaries, recent associations of very high energy neutrinos with accreting supermassive black holes, large samples of tidal disruption events from all- sky time domain surveys, new capabilities for X-ray monitoring of X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei, and the first radio interferometric images of a central black hole in M87 and our own Milky Way, as well as theoretical developments in black hole binary formation channels, and numerical simulations of black hole formation and galaxy-black hole coevolution, make 2023 an exciting time for this meeting.

Topics covered by the meeting include:

• Time domain observations of accreting black holes of all mass scales across the electromagnetic spectrum
• New window on the stellar-mass black hole mass function from gravitational wave detections by LIGO and Virgo
• Shedding light on dormant black holes in galaxy nuclei with observations of tidal disruption events
• Hydrodynamics of collisions, mergers, and tidal disruptions
• Signatures of black hole growth through mergers from binary black holes and recoiling massive black holes
• Studying the accretion flow of a black hole from the smallest (the event horizon) to largest scales (relativistic jets)
• Evidence for intermediate-mass black holes, and their implications for the nature of black hole seeds
• The black hole at the center of our Milky Way

The application deadline for the conference has passed.

Organizing Committee

*Suvi Gezari, Space Telescope Science Institute
Andrea Ghez, University of California Los Angeles
Fred Rasio, Northwestern University
Steinn Sigurdsson, Pennsylvania State University

*In charge of diversity