Ann-Marie Madigan
Eccentric stellar disks orbiting massive black holes
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.
Gas clouds plunging through an accretion disk
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.
Instability in the outer solar system
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.
Halle
(UC Berkeley)
Rodriguez
(CU Boulder)
Lieb
(CU Boulder)
Christensen
(CU Boulder)
Roley
(CU Boulder)