Found by JMU physics major: A triple Supermassive Black Hole system

Congratulations: Our own junior physics major Jenna Harvey co-authored a paper describing the fantastic discovery of a system of three supermassive black holes on a close collision course!

This work, which just appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, was led by graduate student Ryan Pfeifle, under the advising of Prof. Shobita Satyapal of George Mason University, and involves a team of scientists who put together observations and measurements from quite a variety of telescopes, both ground and space based.




The massive crash of three galaxies at the center of which this triple accreting supermassive black hole system has been discovered was found thanks to new techniques that exploited the power of infrared light to peer through cosmic dust that usually enshrouds, and thus hides, newly activated black holes that just started sucking matter onto them.

The paper that describes this discovery, which Jenna co-authored, provides one of the strongest observational evidence to date for such a triple interacting galaxy system, which has eluded us until now.

Jenna's contribution to this work, under the advice of professor Anca Constantin, entailed analysis of observations from the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBT).  Jenna worked on the LBT data the collaboration has for a sample of fifteen interacting galaxy pairs, and found that in one of these systems, that showed an unusual ensemble of three X-ray nuclear sources, gas is swirling at speeds of thousands of km/s (which is just a fraction of the speed of light), proving that it is through galaxy collisions events like this one that black holes begin to actively snack and therefore grow, maybe before they merge onto a larger one.

An overview of Jenna's work on the whole sample of interacting galaxies that hosted this unusual discovery can be seen in the poster that she presented at the end of summer 2019 at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.

This discovery has gotten a lot of press already, check them all out: NASA press release, CNN, Space.com, The Register (UK), VICE, a German newspaper, the LBT site, and you might even have heard about it already from Fox and MSN.

Way to go Jenna!

Physics weekend affairs again: the CAA Undergraduate Research Conference

The weekend of the April 13th-15th , I [Jimmy Corcoran, a junior physics major] had the opportunity to participate at the Colonial Academic Alliance (CAA) Undergraduate Research Conference [at Old Dominion University in Norfolk].  Initially I wasn't sure I was skeptical about whether or not I would enjoy the experience, but I was quickly reassured.  There were events spaced out throughout the entire weekend, enough so that you always knew you were kept in an academic mindset, but not so many that you felt overwhelmed and didn't have enough time to relax.  Everything over the course of the trip went smoothly, both of the keynote speakers were fantastic speakers and were able to captivate the entire audience, regardless of their academic focus; the spacing out of all of the student presentations, and even all of the meals prepared for everybody were fantastic.  Overall I thought it was really a fantastic experience to be around so many people involved in undergraduate research in their respective fields, and also for the opportunity to share the research I've been doing with my peers from the entire CAA.  

Jimmy  was one of the 3 physics majors representing JMU physics and astronomy undergraduate research (out of a total of 10 JMU selected undergraduates): Jimmy the astronomer was accompanied by Ethan Cummings and Thomas Hoke (both juniors) who presented their findings on some novel materials' behavior at this 10th annual CAA conference.   Here are the three of them ( ...musketeers in quest for scientific answers to how the world works):

and here are some details about their presentations, as described in the Madison Scholar. 

What can we say, they have their own ways of saving the world!

We heard not once that "they were excellent presenters!"