Caltech/IPAC Lunch Seminar

All massive galaxies host a supermassive black hole at their centers, with masses millions to billions of times that of the Sun. During phases of rapid growth, these black holes power luminous accretion disks that drive energetic winds into the surrounding interstellar medium. Such winds are believed to play a fundamental role in regulating galaxy evolution. The coupling between winds and the interstellar medium is expected to be strongest near the peak epoch of galaxy and black hole growth, roughly 10 billion years ago, when many systems were heavily obscured by thick layers of gas and dust. In this talk, I will present my work exploring the formation and assembly of massive galaxies in the early universe using new infrared observations that probe the most dust-enshrouded phases of black hole growth. I will highlight results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which enables spatially resolved spectroscopy with unprecedented sensitivity and allows detailed studies of galaxy formation physics at earlier cosmic epochs than previously possible. In particular, I will present new molecular tracers of galactic outflows using organic molecules, revealing feedback from rapidly growing black holes as early as one billion years after the Big Bang. Finally, I will discuss how all-sky infrared surveys such as the SPHEREx mission will extend studies of quasar evolution to large statistical samples of quasars across cosmic time. When combined with time-domain observations from Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will provide new insight into the inner structures of dust-obscured quasars and how energy from actively accreting black holes couples to the surrounding interstellar medium.