Early galaxies and infant black holes in the early Universe
Roberto Maiolino (University of Cambridge)
Thursday 16/04/2026 @ 11:30, Sala Plenaria Centro Congressi Area della Ricerca CNR-INAF
With the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope, the past few years have been truly transformational for our understanding of the distant Universe, yielding a plethora of unexpected and groundbreaking results. These include the discovery of very luminous galaxies within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, often exhibiting peculiar chemical enrichment patterns. Equally compelling is the identification of a large, previously unknown population of massive black holes in the early Universe, with properties that differ drastically from those of their counterparts at later cosmic epochs. In this lecture, I will provide a brief overview of these discoveries and discuss how they are reshaping our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies and black holes in the early Universe.