Celebrating our Undergraduate Researchers!
I’m thrilled to highlight the outstanding research contributions of four talented undergraduate students who have been working with me and CJ Harris this past academic year: Maria Herrmann (she/her), Eva Jaku (she/her), August Moser (he/him), and Olivia Korensky (he/him).
These students have been analyzing Hubble Space Telescope imaging data to search for indirect evidence of past binary supermassive black hole (SMBH) activity in large, nearby galaxies. As you may know, supermassive black holes, with masses millions to billions of times that of our Sun, reside at the centers of most galaxies. When galaxies merge, these black holes sink to the center of the resulting galaxy and eventually form a binary pair. These binaries are significant because they are expected to emit gravitational waves, and in the past year, experiments using pulsar timing arrays have announced tantalizing evidence for the detection of these waves.
Despite this monumental breakthrough, confirmed observations of binary supermassive black hole systems remain elusive. Our research aims to address this puzzle by looking for a telltale sign of these systems in action: “missing light” at the center of galaxies. Interactions between binary supermassive black holes and stars in the galactic center can eject stars outwards, creating this deficit that can be detected in Hubble images.
Maria, Eva, August, and Olivia have played a crucial role in analyzing Hubble images at infrared and optical wavelengths to identify these subtle features. Their diligence and hard work culminated in poster presentations at two recent events: the Astronomy Department Undergraduate Research Day (Eva, August, and Olivia) and the UROP symposium (Maria, Eva, and August).
I’m incredibly proud of their dedication and the valuable contributions they’ve made to our understanding of galaxy evolution and supermassive black hole binaries. I wish them all the best in their future endeavors, and I’m especially excited to share that Olivia will be continuing his research journey this summer in Krakow, Poland!
