Ann-Marie Madigan

The double nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy has been a puzzle since its discovery by balloon-borne experiments in the early 1970s. It is best modeled as a single eccentric disk of stars, which orbits a massive black hole.

The physics of how gas accretes onto supermassive black holes is hugely important in astrophysics. It is a difficult topic of research however, involving three-dimensional, hot, magnetic plasmas.

The orbits of icy minor planets beyond Neptune are doing something very strange: they all tilt and pitch in similar ways, and maybe even cluster together on the sky. In a 2016 paper, my collaborator Mike McCourt and I show that when gravitational forces between minor planets on eccentric orbits are included in N-body simulations, the orbits incline rapidly off the disk plane, and tilt and pitch in exactly the same way.