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Blast 2024 BHI Fellow Symposium

CMSA Seminar Room G-02 (Basement Level)

SCHEDULE OF TALKS
9:30 – 9:35 a.m. Opening remarks by BHI Director Peter Galison
9:35 – 9:40 a.m. Overview of BLAST workshops by organizer BHI PI Priya Natarajan
9:45 – 10:00 a.m. – Evita Verheijden Cryptographic Censorship
10:00 – 10:15 a.m. – Prashant Kocherlakota Universality of Energy Extraction through Outflows in Black Hole Spacetimes
10:15 – 10:30 a.m. – Helen Meskhidze Beyond Classification and Prediction: The Promise of Physics-Informed Machine Learning in Astronomy and Cosmology
SHORT COFFEE BREAK
10:45 – 11:00 a.m. – Daniel Palumbo Prospects for the Measurement of Light Orbiting a Black Hole
11:00 – 11:15 a.m. – Angelo Ricarte Spin Evolution in a MAD Universe
11:15 – 11:30 a.m. – Kung-Yi Su Suppression of cooling flows by cosmic rays in jet cocoon shock fronts
11:30 – 11:45 a.m. – Atul Sharma Advances in celestial holography
11:45 – 12:00 p.m. – Sasha Plavin Multimessenger Signatures of Hadrons in AGN Jets at Multiple Scales
12:00 pm – 1 p.m. – LUNCH AT THE BHI (2nd Floor)

ORGANIZER: BLack holes Across Space and Time Series – Priya Natarajan, External PI, BHI
With support from the John Templeton Foundation & The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Biography

Sara is an observational astronomer and a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. Her research centers around the collection, calibration, and imaging of millimeter-wave radio observations of supermassive black holes. Supermassive black holes generate the highest energy processes in the known Universe, ejecting jets of plasma affecting galaxy environments on large scales, but their dynamics and emission mechanisms remain shrouded in mystery. She makes use of global networks of radio-telescopes to image and study the immediate surroundings of the supermassive black holes at the centers of our Galaxy and the galaxy M87. Sara aims to expand millimeter-wave radio imaging capabilities and forge strong connections between the first images of supermassive black hole shadows and physics probed by partner facilities across the electromagnetic spectrum. Multi-wavelength constraints on black hole accretion flow properties will critically inform the scientific interpretation of images of black hole shadows, our understanding of jet-launching mechanisms, black hole spin measurements, and, ultimately, precision tests of General Relativity.

PhD, Astrophysics, Radboud University (2021),  MSc, Physics and Astronomy, Radboud University (2017), BSc, Physics, McGill University (2015)

Two postdocs at the Black Hole Initiative, Freek Roelofs and Angelo Ricarte, have been involved in some groundbreaking results released today. Their measurements demonstrate the presence of spiraling light – or circular polarization – providing more conclusive evidence of strong magnetic fields around the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87.

The two papers describing these results have just been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. One of the papers was led by Freek Roelofs, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), a part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). The other paper is by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Several other people, currently or formerly at the BHI, also collaborated on both papers.

Read the full press release by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.

Computer simulation of a black hole surrounded by a magnetically arrested disk.
Image Credit: George Wong (IAS)