[Astro] Seminar this week: James Nightingale

[Jesse Golden-Marx (staff)]

Hi Everyone,
      I hope that you're all looking forward to James Nightingale's visit tomorrow.  We still have a few spots for lunch tomorrow (including for students).  Please let me know if you would like to join for lunch.

Cheers,
Jesse
________________________________
From: Astro <astro-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of Jesse Golden-Marx (staff) <Jesse.Golden-Marx at nottingham.ac.uk>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2025 10:28 AM
To: Nottingham Astro Group <astro at nottingham.ac.uk>; James Rice <James.Rice at nottingham.ac.uk>; candelazerbo <candelazerbo at gmail.com>; Mathias Urbano (staff) <Mathias.Urbano at nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Astro] Seminar this week: James Nightingale

Hi Everyone,
      I hope that all of you are doing well.  Our first external seminar of the semester is this week.  The seminar will be in C4 at 15:45. Our speaker is Dr. James Nightingale (Newcastle), a Nottingham alumnus.  The title and abstract can be found below.  James will be arriving at Nottingham around 12:00 on Wednesday.  If you would like to join for lunch, please let me know by tomorrow.  We still have spots to sponsor a few postgraduate students who are interested.  The schedule of events is listed below.

~13:00 — Lunch with seminar speaker
15:00 — Meeting with Postgraduate students (A113)
15:45 — Seminar (C4)
16:45 — Wine and Cheese reception

Additionally, James will be spending the night in Nottingham, so there will be a dinner with the speaker.  We'll be going to Sanchan's Thai restaurant in Beeston.  If you are interested in joining and haven't already messaged me (Jesse), please let me know as soon as possible as I'm planning to make the reservation later this afternoon.

Cheers,
Jesse, Tutku, and Luke





Supermassive Black Holes, Galaxies and Dark Matter with Strong Gravitational Lensing



In a strong gravitational lens, a background source galaxy appears multiple times, because its light is deflected by an intervening foreground galaxy’s mass. Lens modeling reverses the source galaxy’s deflected emission and reconstructs the foreground lens’s projected gravitational potential at an unprecedented level of detail, providing Astronomer’s with a powerful tool to study the Universe. I present the first measurement of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass using strong lensing, detecting a $\log_{10}(M_{\text{BH}}/M_{\odot}) = 3.27 \pm 2.12 \times 10^{10}$ SMBH in the $z = 0.451$ lens Abell 1201. I discuss the potential for lensing to measure additional SMBH masses and its implications for black hole demographics. I then explore how strong lensing enhances traditional studies of galaxy structure, revealing complex features such as boxiness, diskiness, asymmetric twists, lopsidedness, and stellar-to-dark matter offsets—features that challenge our current understanding of galaxy formation. Finally, I demonstrate how unseen dark matter substructures perturb lensed emission, providing a unique opportunity to test different dark matter models, provided that we can overcome limitations in our knowledge of galaxy mass distributions.


Jesse Golden-Marx, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate

Centre for Astronomy & Particle Theory
School of Physics & Astronomy
University of Nottingham
University Park, Nottingham, UK
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