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!

New Possibilities on the Horizon

On Friday Giovanna Scarel and Steve Whisnant attended a meeting in Newport News at Jefferson Lab to learn about current facilities and new ideas for light sources. JLab currently has a free-electron laser (FEL) that can produce light in the wavelength range from microns to about about 300 nm. In addition to this facility, there is a plan developing to build a new, so-called, Next Generation Light Source (NGLS) that can provide light (not coherent in this case) up into the soft x-ray region. This facility will provide unprecedented brightness and luminosity.

What is really interesting about this idea is that it would put a world-class light source a short drive from JMU. This will make it possible to expand the horizons of our faculty and students to explore the world in new ways. We are at the beginning of the process. Much work to do to make this happen.

Posters in California

On May 2, James Hauver and William Henderson presented posters on their work from the summer of 2010 on photoneutron production with polarized gamma rays. Linearly polarized gamma rays provide a new window into these reactions and are particularly interesting for the student of fissile nuclides.

The targets Jimmy and William studied are Ta and Sn. The interesting observable is the ratio of the neutron yield in the plane of polarization divided by the yield at right angles to the beam polarization direction. This ratio, R, is a function of photon and neutron energy and provides a characteristic response for nuclei that is often enough different from other nuclei that some identification of the target can be made. This is particularly true for fissile material.

More targets will be studied this summer including La, Ce, Dy, and Hg.

One of Our JMU Undergrad Astronomers at NCUR 2011

At this year's National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR), JMU's Physics and Astronomy research was represented by Nathan DiDomenico (a sophomore!), who presented his work on "The Spectral Properties of Galaxies with Water Maser Emission." In Nathan's own words, here are some thoughts about this event:

Last week I was in Ithaca New York for the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) held at Ithaca College. The conference was fun and interesting. Being able to get out of class for a few days and getting to know other students who are doing research at JMU was definitely a plus. NCUR is a conference for students involved in all areas of research so I was able to see thought provoking presentations from many different fields. We left JMU Wednesday in the early morning and 8 hours later we were in Ithaca New York.

There were really two parts to the conference, the oral presentations that were held in several of the university’s lecture halls, and the poster presentations held in the school’s gym.

Both types of presentations were interesting to go to. At the poster sessions I was able to browse through a number of interesting presentations and discuss them with the student conducting that research; discussions were informal and thus provided good opportunities to get exposed to a broad sample of research conducted by students all around the nation. The oral presentations consisted in fifteen minutes talks plus five minutes after the talk set aside for questions; I think many of them were very well prepared.

I personally presented a poster, my first on the work I conducted so far on the properties of galaxies that host megamasers. Megamasers in disk configurations (in active galactic nuclei) give us the vital ability to get accurate distance measurements to very distant galaxies. Because of this, it is essential that we locate a much larger sample of these megamaser disks to constrain the Hubble constant; knowing the host properties of the galaxies that have masers is key to finding more of these megamasers disks. I have compiled optical data for the largest sample of galaxies hosting masers and classified them via their optical emission lines. I was able to present my research to a number of interested students as well as scientists who had come to the conference.

I would suggest that any wise college student adheres to the fooling creed: “work hard play hard”. The group of 11 JMU students (as well as the faculty chaperones) I went to NCUR with was no exception. When we were not presenting our research or learning of about others’ research we wasted no time in goofing around. The first night we were there we conquered the pizzas from “Northeast Pizza and Beer” (that place gives new meaning the words “large pizza”), and then to our delight discovered that it was karaoke night. We couldn’t deny the crowd the sound of our voices, so we sang a few classics (I think we had a pretty sizeable fan base before we left). In the evenings we typically agreed on a place to eat and joked with each other into the night. The group was able to bond quickly and overall everyone seemed to enjoy each other’s company; this made the trip just as entertaining as it was educational.

My bottom line: undergraduates involved in research should try not to miss the opportunity to participate to an NCUR.

-Nathan DiDomenico

Here is Nathan enthusiastically explaining his findings to a good crowd of undergraduate science sponges.... aaah, students.

In case you need more reasons to be jealous of the good time NCUR students could generally have, added here is also a little (rather poorly in quality) movie caught by one of the two faculty chaperones during one of the impressively well organized lunches.

Tales from the March Meeting

Every year, one of the largest gatherings of physicists in the world is the March Meeting of the American Physical Society. Each year, thousands of physicists who specialize in condensed matter, solid state, materials, and related subdisciplines meet for a week in the middle of March to share what they've discovered. This year's meeting was in Pittsburgh, PA from 3/16-3/20 and was attended by JMU faculty members Chris Hughes, Scott Paulson, and Brian Utter, future faculty member Giovanna Scarel, and senior physics major Bruno Caputo.

Scott started out the week on Monday with a talk on the nanotube research he had been doing with physics majors Lok-Kun Tsui and Joe Hardcastle. On Wednesday, Bruno gave a talk on his research work on the adhesion of metal films to polymer surfaces. This is work he has been doingin the Augustine/Hughes lab with chemistry major Alan Mo and physics majors Jon Wyrick (now in grad school at UC-Irvine) and Ethan Rosenthal. Later on Wednesday afternoon, Chris gave a talk in a session about Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) programs on the impact of participation in our chemistry REU and materials REU program on student performance in the classroom. On Thursday morning, Giovanna gave a presentation of some of the research she has been doing at NCSU, some of which will be part of the lab she sets up here this fall. Finally, on Thursday, Brian talked about his work on jamming in granular systems. Brian's talk has the additional honor of being an "invited" talk, a distinction that shows that the organizers of that session identified him as one of the more prominent researchers in that field and asked him to come to the meeting to present it.

Bruno's talk is exceptional in another way. While it is not unheard of, it is not typical for undergraduates to have the opportunity to present at the March Meeting. The vast majority of talks are given by professors, post-docs, industrial and governmental staff scientists, and grad students. Bruno was kind enough to give us some of his thought on the experience:

"Undergraduate research at James Madison University is what makes the primary undergraduate institution (PUI) concept such a beneficial experience. The research we get to take part in is on the forefront of science worldwide; the kinds of stuff graduate students get to work on. Not undergrads. Well, here at James Madison University, I am able to work side by side with my advisor, Dr. Chris Hughes. I am able to experiment with my own ideas and develop my own methods for solving problems. Being dedicated to my work, I was able to gather up enough results to present my work in front of a small crowd at the Virginia Academy of Science meeting at Hampton University in May 2008. This experience was a rush to say the least. I got to show all that I have learned and was quizzed at the end with questions to really prove myself.

Gaining the confidence to go out and do this again, Dr. Hughes recommended me talk at the APS March meeting in Pittsburgh last week. This was a whole new experience. March meeting [according to Dr. Paulson] is one of the biggest Materials Science/Condensed Matter symposiums in the world. There were people everywhere. Like a past researcher in my group said, “I never knew there were that many people out there like me.” This is the absolute truth. Conversations were overheard left and right from the electronic properties of graphene to thin film gold adhesion on polymer substrates. The latter was my topic. I got to give my talk in front of many more people and was the master of the topic in the room. It is a great feeling getting the experience of talking among grad students, professors and even Nobel Prize laureates and teaching them what I know and what I have worked so hard to obtain.

Next year I will be attending the University of California, Santa Barbara. Going to an R1 school like this, I will really be in there with the big dogs. The thing is, I will have more preparation and first hand research experience than most any incoming first years. These past presentations gave me the leg up as an undergraduate scientist."