HKU Astrophysicist Lixin DAI Named RGC Research Fellow for Pioneering Black Hole Research

Professor Lixin DAI in the Department of Physics has been honoured under the Research Grants Council’s Research Fellow Scheme for the 2026/27 academic year.

Her awarded project, “Modelling Super-Eddington Accretion Physics from Cosmic Dawn Quasars to Gravitational-Wave Counterparts,” seeks to develop a unified framework for understanding how black holes consume matter beyond the theoretical Eddington limit.

According to classical physics, radiation pressure should prevent matter from continuing to fall into a black hole once this limit is reached. However, astronomical observations suggest that black holes frequently exceed it, powering extreme phenomena such as tidal disruption events, binary black hole mergers in active galactic nucleus disks, and the recently discovered “Little Red Dots” in the early universe.

Professor Dai’s team will use advanced general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations and radiative-transfer calculations to investigate these processes and predict their observable signatures across different wavelengths. The findings will support observations by major international space missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Einstein Probe.

The project will advance understanding of black hole growth and energetic cosmic events, while strengthening Hong Kong’s position as an international centre for black hole astrophysics.