College of Arts and Sciences senior Mason Rhodes, left, and sophomore Alan Roden, right, received NASA Nebraska Space Grant Fellowships for 2019-2020 to fund their work on the extreme environments around quasars as members of the Creighton Observational Astrophysics Research (CrObAR) group led by Jack Gabel, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Physics. Quasars are among the most energetic objects in the universe and are powered by matter falling into supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies.
Roden’s project involves a study of the mechanisms by which quasars extract their energy from the disks of infalling material that form just outside of the black holes’ event horizons.
Rhodes’s study involves analysis of high energy winds that are driven away from the black holes by the powerful radiation emitted by the quasars.
Both researchers are developing computer simulations of the inner environments of quasars to compare with large archival datasets in order to test models of the observed phenomena. Their work is part of the CrObAR group’s overall efforts to better understand the fundamental processes that power quasars, the growth and evolution of black holes and the effects quasars have on their large-scale galactic environments.
