Searching for Intermediate Mass Black Holes in Spiral Galaxies with the Help of Citizen Scientists

This Powerpoint presentation was created and formatted specifically for the Coffee and Viz event series held in the Hunt Library's Teaching and Visualization Lab at North Carolina State University. More details on the Teaching and Visualization Lab may be found at: https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/spaces/teaching-and-visualization-lab. Presentation Summary: Nearly every large galaxy appears to host a supermassive black hole in its nucleus, whose mass ranges from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The origin of these black holes is still not understood but rare, intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs; ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Sun) may shed light on the problem. Measuring the mass of a nuclear black hole requires significant telescope resources so a method of identifying a few probable candidates is necessary. Patrick Treuthardt will discuss an efficient means of identifying spiral galaxies that potentially harbor IMBHs with the help of citizen scientists, all-sky surveys, and existing scaling relations.