High-Energy Astrophysics

While peering into the early universe, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has found black holes with masses equivalent to billions of suns. These discoveries raise new questions: How did the black holes form so rapidly? Could their extreme environments challenge our acceptance of Einstein’s theory of general relativity? How does matter behave in other extremely dense objects, such as the cores of neutron stars?

Such conditions have no equivalent on Earth, but UMD astronomers study high-energy phenomena in innovative ways. They lead in interpreting data from X-ray observatories, including NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), and developing the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS), a proposed successor to Chandra. UMD astronomers also use numerical simulations to understand complex processes such as the formation of accretion disks around black holes. By studying the gravitational waves rippling off of merging black holes, they also explore some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, including whether gravity acts as Einstein predicted.