Pablo Pencil del Campo is studying the quasi-periodic oscillations of blazers. His research may potentially uncover evidence of the existence of of a binary supermassive black hole. Photo credit: NASA
Three Clemson University astrophysicists, Pablo Penil del Campo and Nuria Torres-Alba, postdoctoral fellows, and Stefano Marchesi, an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, have been awarded more than $1 million combined in highly competitive grants through the NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program to study active galactic nuclei, their obscuring material, and variability and periodicity. Penil will study four blazars that show periodic gamma-ray emissions, using a decade of NASA data to investigate whether these patterns indicate a binary system of supermassive black holes, which could provide new insights into galaxy evolution. Marchesi and Torres-Alba are using NASA’s X-ray telescope data to study dense, cosmic gas environments around supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies, where energetic X-ray photons penetrate gas, allowing researchers to characterize black hole properties and surrounding structures. Marchesi and Torres-Alba are also studying how efficiently supermassive black holes grow by consuming surrounding gas and how this process impacts their nearby and distant environments, providing insights into extreme cosmic phenomena. Marchesi and Torres-Alba are using machine-learning methods developed by Ross Silver and Xiuri Zhao, former graduate students at Clemson, to analyze a vast dataset of X-ray observations, aiming to create the largest sample of obscuration-variable supermassive black holes and gain new insights into black hole structures.
Credit: David Brandin
