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Background

Peter Breiding’s research is focused on the role of supermassive black holes in the co-evolution with their galactic and extragalactic environments. 

Supermassive black holes, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of our sun, are believed to reside in the centers of all massive galaxies. The mass of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is tightly correlated with various host galaxy properties of the spheroid or bulge component (including mass and velocity dispersion) despite these galactic components being well outside the black hole gravitational sphere of influence. A small fraction (roughly 10%) of these supermassive black holes also accrete surrounding matter and produce prodigious levels of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, even outshining their host galaxies — a phenomenon astronomers refer to as active galactic nuclei (AGN). 

Roughly 10% of AGN also give rise to large-scale relativistic jets born through the activity of their supermassive black holes. The connection between the mass of supermassive black holes with the masses and velocities of their host galaxy bulges/spheroids, and various other lines of evidence, link the growth of supermassive black holes to the growth, evolution and dynamics of their surrounding galactic and extragalactic environments (e.g., through the formation of stars or the ejection and heating of surrounding galactic and intracluster gas).

Breiding’s research involves the analysis of data from observatories across the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, sub-mm, optical/IR/UV, X-ray and gamma-ray) to study AGN, constrain their role in galaxy evolution and study the dynamics of supermassive black holes. In particular, much of his work centers on AGN with powerful jets, addressing questions such as how these jets are formed and how they might influence the formation of stars in their host galaxies. 

Another significant focus of his work concerns multi-wavelength observations of binary supermassive black holes and gravitational-wave recoiling supermassive black holes. The former class of objects is the primary source of long-wavelength gravitational waves detected recently by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) such as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav, of which he is a participating member). 

Gravitational-wave recoiling supermassive black holes are the end result of the coalescence of two binary supermassive black holes after they have expended all of their orbital energy as gravitational waves. Studying this object class can help reveal the efficiency with which binary supermassive black holes navigate their late-stage evolution, which is still highly uncertain and pertinent to current and future long-wavelength gravitational-wave experiments with PTAs. 

In addition to NANOGrav, Breiding is a member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s SDSS-V and 3CR collaborations, in which the SDSS-V survey provides multi-epoch IR/optical spectroscopy of the entire sky; the 3CR collaboration studies some of the most powerful radio-loud AGN in the universe.

Select Publications

• P. Breiding, M. Chiaberge, E. Lambrides, E.T. Meyer, S.P. Willner, B. Hilbert, M. Haas, G. Miley, E.S. Perlman, P. Barthel, C.P. O’Dea, A. Capetti, B. Wilkes, S.A. Baum, D.F. Macchetto, William Sparks, G. Tremblay and C. Norman, “Powerful Radio-Loud Quasars are Triggered by Galaxy Mergers in the Cosmic Bright Ages.” The Astrophysical Journal, 963, 91 (2024)
• P. Breiding, E.T. Meyer, M. Georganopoulos, K. Reddy, A. Roychowhury and K. Kollman, “A Multi-Wavelength Study of Multiple Spectral Component Jets in AGN: Testing the IC/CMBModel for the Large-Scale-Jet X-ray Emission.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 518, 3222 (2023)
• P. Breiding, S. Burke-Spolaor, T. An, K. Bansal, P. Mohan, G. Taylor, and Y. Zhang, “Deep Very Long Baseline Interferometry Observations Challenge Previous Evidence of a Binary Supermassive Black Hole Residing in Seyfert Galaxy NGC 7674.” The Astrophysical Journal, 933, 143 (2022)
• P. Breiding, S. Burke-Spolaor, M. Eracleous, T. Bogdaovi ́c, J.W.T. Lazio, J. Runnoe and S. Sigurdsson, “The Search for Binary Supermassive Black Holes Among Quasars with Offset Broad Lines Using the Very Long Baseline Array.” The Astrophysical Journal, 914, 37 (2021)

Education

• PhD, MS, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• BS, University of Virginia

Research Interests

• Galaxy formation and evolution
• Binary supermassive black holes
• Gravitational-waverecoiling supermassive black holes
• Active galactic nuclei
• Extragalactic jets

Research Profile