External Galaxies Commons^™

Unveiling Stellar Core Depletion In Ngc 4649 With Jwst Nircam, Sydney Krause

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Galaxies are considered to have depleted cores when the central region’s concentration of stars is lower than typical, a feature linked to supermassive black hole formation and vital in galaxy evolution studies. In this project, “Unveiling Stellar Core Depletion in NGC 4649 with JWST NIRCam”, Space-based archival data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) was utilized for several forms of analysis. Initial analysis involved accessing these images via SAO DS9, an astrophysics software for viewing and manipulating files. These images were analyzed using Photoutils, a Python based coding package, part of the Astropy extension. To …

Ngc 4374 With Jwst/Nircam: A Central Structural Analysis Revealing A Depleted Core And Agn, Elizabeth Crevinston

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

We use James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) F150W imaging to study the central regions of massive elliptical galaxies, focusing on their partially depleted cores. These cores are thought to form when a binary supermassive black hole (SMBH) ejects stars from the central regions through dynamical three-body interactions. After the binary coalesces, gas accretion onto the newly formed SMBH can trigger a compact active galactic nucleus (AGN), which plays a key role in regulating star formation and shaping galaxy structure. With JWST NIRCam, we extracted the surface brightness profile of NGC 4374, a giant elliptical galaxy in …

Out Of This World: An Exoplanetary Workshop, Monica Storss, Bart Kuipers

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The workshop investigates how scientific constraints can productively defamiliarize human experience and create new frameworks for creativity and expression. Participants will produce original work while considering broader questions about environment, perception, and cultural formation in speculative contexts, and how the arts, sciences, and technology inform each other in relational multiplicities. This generative workshop explores how astronomical data from confirmed exoplanets can generate new poetic forms and linguistic constraints. Participants will examine how exoplanetary conditions can shape language, metaphor, and narrative structure. We'll develop from writing exercises that respond to non-terrestrial physical parameters: alternative light spectra, gravitational variations, and atmospheric compositions. …

How Hidden Companions Skew Stellar Ages: A Binary-Inclusive Analysis Of Ngc 2168, Skylar G. Butler

Student Research Symposium (SRS)

We expand upon our previous analysis of NGC 2168 (M35), which investigated the precision of isochrone-based age determination for individual main-sequence stars using photometric modeling. Building on that earlier framework, we now assess how inferred stellar ages change when each object is modeled under the assumption that it may possess an unresolved binary companion. Using post burn in posterior samples from the same dataset, we computed the mean Stage 3 ages for more than 3,000 cluster members with binaries turned on, allowing a direct comparison to our prior results with binaries turned off. The resulting age distribution peaks near 2.1 …

029— Calculating Gravitational Waves In A Black Hole Binary System, Nami Nishimura

GREAT Day Posters

Our ultimate goal is to compute the gravitational waves in an extreme mass-ratio binary system. Since gravitational perturbations are difficult to calculate, we model the compact object as a point carrying a scalar charge q and moving around a spinning black holes.

In this project, we take advantage of symmetry under rotation around the spin axis in order to separate φ variables and leverage the periodicity of the source to separate t variable with a Fourier series. The remaining differential equations will be solved numerically with an appropriate discretization considering a grid of points in r-θ plane

Galaxy And Mass Assembly: A Comparison Between Galaxy-Galaxy Lens Searches In Kids/Gama, Shawn Knabel, Benne Holwerda

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Strong gravitational lenses are cases where a distant background galaxy is located directly behind a massive foreground galaxy, whose gravity causes the light from the background galaxy to bend around the foreground galaxy. In addition to being visually stunning, these rare events are useful laboratories for furthering our understanding of gravity and cosmology and to determine properties, such as the mass and dark matter content, of the lensing galaxies themselves. The trouble is finding enough of these strong gravitational lenses for further study. The immensity of the catalogs being collected by state-of-the-art telescopes requires equally innovative methods for interpreting that …

Dance Of Two Supermassive Binary Black Holes, Karishma Bansal

Shared Knowledge Conference

Black holes exist in a various range of masses ranging from stellar mass (~ 10 Solar Mass) to Supermassive black holes (SMBHs, million to billion Solar Mass). It is expected that as the separation between the black holes decreases, emission of gravitational waves will grow stronger, which makes binary black holes one of the most promising sources for gravitational radiation detection. Gravitational waves from merging stellar-mass black holes have recently been discovered by LIGO; however, we are yet to detect them from binary SMBHs. These massive black holes reside at the heart of most of the galaxies and when two …

Primordial Black Hole Atoms, David Zwick, Tyler Hanover, Brian Nepper

STEM Student Research Symposium Posters

Primordial black holes are thought to have been formed at the early stages of the universe in the presence of non-homogeneous density distributions of dark matter. We are working under the assumption that dark matter consists of elementary low mass particles, specifically, spin 1/2 fermions. We further assume that dark matter is electrically neutral, thus its main interaction is gravitational. We investigate dark matter spin 1/2 fermions in orbit around a black hole atom and consider mass ranges for which the quantum description is appropriate. Solutions to the Dirac equation are utilized to describe the radial mass distribution of primordial …

Gaussian Representation Of Active Galactic Nuclei, Jeffrey W. Klimes, Matthew Lister

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the areas around the centers of galaxies with high luminosity in much of the electromagnetic spectrum. The existing model of AGN describes the high luminosity as the result of accretion of matter around a black hole at the galaxy’s center. Many AGN generate superluminal jets of density higher than the surrounding interstellar medium. The cause for and mechanics driving the relativistic jets are not well understood. In addition, the jets often change direction decaparsecs away from their associated cores, the cause of which has not been well explained. In order to better understand the mechanics …

Oral Presentation: The Universe In A Box, Jason Jaacks

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

When and how galaxies formed throughout the history of the Universe is one of the most fundamental questions of astronomy and astrophysics. As technology improves, astronomers are able to push the frontier of galaxy observation to a period when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old. This is when the first galaxies are beginning to form. However, beyond the limits of observational technology lies data fundamental to our complete understanding of these processes. Using state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamic computer codes combined with access to the nation’s largest and fastest supercomputers, we are able to simulate the formation and evolution …

Halo Occupation Of Lyman-Break Galaxies, Saju Varghese, Ken Nagamine, Jason Jaacks, Jun-Hwan Choi

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) are star-forming galaxies found at high redshift that provide large amounts of information on early star and galaxy formation. We use large-scale cosmological smoothed-particle hydrodynamical simulations to simulate the physical properties of LBGs, such as stellar mass, star-formation rate, and magnitude. In particular, we focus on the question of which dark matter (DM) halos host LBGs. Our simulation suggests that only 1.74% of all DM halos host LBGs, though among the massive DM halos with mass Mhalo >1011.5 Msun, the fraction is 51.93%. The occupation number of LBGs ranges from 1 to 17 per halo.