›Black Holes by the Black Sea

This workshop will focus on the astrophysics of black holes at the extremes of the supermassive black hole mass function with the aim of illuminating similarities and differences between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes.  The main topics to be addressed are (1) the connection between X-ray binaries and AGNs.  Are there fundamental, universal modes of accretion and jet/outflow production that operate on both small and large scales? What do the differences in SEDs and spectral properties indicate about the different physics at work? (2) Connecting the dots between the largest stellar-mass black holes and the smallest supermassive black holes. How large can “ordinary” stellar-mass black holes be at formation and how large can they become? How small are the smallest supermassive black holes? Where did they come from, and do they play by the same rules as other supermassive black holes?  (3) The largest supermassive black holes. What do the largest supermassive black holes tell us about the extremes and limits of nature? Do we have an observational hold on the largest black holes?