"We've inferred the existence of many supermassive black holes by now," Broekgaarden says. Because they are millions of times less massive than a supermassive black hole, stellar-mass black holes are far more difficult to identify. Because supermassive black holes are so immense, astronomers can infer their existence from the way that a galaxy's stars revolve around them or from light that is produced when it accretes gas.īroekgaarden studies stellar-mass black holes, which result from the collapse of a single star.
One possibility is that when one particularly massive star collapses on itself, it accretes gas and other stars or black holes to grow to a size that can reach to millions or even billions of times its original mass. Most of the black holes identified and studied by astronomers so far are supermassive. "They also teach us about the birth and evolution of the first stars, the age and composition of the universe, and a host of other important topics in astronomy." "They provide extreme tests of the theory of general relativity," he says. In her Harvard Horizons project "Gravitational Wave Paleontology: A New Frontier to Explore the Lives of Stars to the Edge of Our Observable Universe," she merges astrophysics and big data in her quest to provide new insights into the death - and life - of stars.ĭaniel Holz, a professor at the University of Chicago who sits on Broekgaarden's dissertation committee, says that the study of black holes advances understanding of fundamental physics and the origins of the cosmos. This year, Broekgaarden was one of eight students selected as a 2023 Harvard Horizons Scholar, which recognizes the ideas and innovations of Harvard's most accomplished PhD students and helps them gain essential professional skills. "I was fascinated."īroekgaarden brings that childhood fascination with the cosmos to her research as a PhD student in astronomy at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. "They seemed like these extreme and mysterious objects in our universe," she says. She became particularly interested in one cosmic phenomenon: black holes. Curious, the 14-year-old took it with her and spent months trying to understand Hawking's ideas about space, time, and special relativity.
A particular volume caught her eye: A Brief History of Time by the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Floor Broekgaarden was rifling through her dad's library in the basement of her childhood home in the Netherlands.
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