Kirpal Nandra
The Astrophysics of Black Hole Growth: Current Status and New Horizons

I will discuss the present status of studies of accreting supermassive
black holes in the Universe, based primarily on their X-ray
emission. Processes close to the event horizon are just beginning to
be revealed, but the details of how matter flows onto black holes is
still poorly understood, as is the apparent connection to phenomena on
vastly larger scales. The current generation of X-ray observatories,
particularly Chandra and XMM-Newton, have provided new insights into
the astrophysics and the demographics of black hole growth. I will
review this progress, and look forward to how this work may be taken
forward in the future with eROSITA, the International X-ray
Observatory (IXO), and a new X-ray observatory concept, GRAVITAS.