Mentor’s Name and Department: Dr. Ka-Wah Wong, Physics
Major and Class Year: Physics, Class of 2028
Long-Term Goals: I hope to work on this project until its conclusion and publish a paper on our findings. I’m hoping that my work on this project will make me a good candidate for future presentations and research opportunities that will further my career and prepare me for grad school.
Project Description:
I’ve been working with data from NASA’s Chandra and NuSTAR X-ray space telescopes to study the active black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 4261 in the Virgo Cluster. This galaxy emits a lot of radio waves, a low energy light ray, but we have also detected gamma- and X-rays from it which are very high energy light rays. The light is produced either by material falling into the black hole or by material ejected as jets during the process. We’ve been exploring various properties of this black hole system that will better help us understand how such high energy and energetic light rays are produced.
What is the most unexpected result from your research experience?
I expected to fly through this project without having any problems. I expected to just sit down each day and do work and have reached a new section of analysis each week. But that’s not how research goes. (I mean sometimes, but rarely). So, the most unexpected thing was having setbacks. Since the research we do is observational, working with data that has already been gathered, and not experimental where you’re actively testing something, I wasn’t really sure how setbacks would arise. I spent three and a half weeks working on something that I thought would only take one because our galaxy is a more complicated and interesting system than we first thought. But that’s ok, that’s how research goes and it’s important to learn that.
This project was made possible thanks to the generosity of the Brockport Foundation.