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Postdoctoral Researcher

• About

  PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Key Collaborator: Mateusz Ruszkowski

  Numerical simulations of galaxy clusters and active galactic nuclei

  Hsiang-Yi (Karen) Yang is studying the origin of two large bubbles recently discovered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at the center of the Milky Way. The “Fermi bubbles” have very unique features, including bi-lobular shapes, sharp edges, flat surface brightness, and hard spectrum. They are nearly symmetrical about the Galactic center, suggesting they probably originate from an episode of energy injection near this point. Yang performs numerical simulations to investigate whether the bubbles could be generated by relativistic jets from the supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy. In these simulations, bipolar jets of cosmic rays injected from the central black hole push the ambient gas away and form two bubbles filled with cosmic rays. These, in turn, can produce gamma-ray emissions as they interact with the Galaxy’s photons. Yang is looking at whether this jet scenario could explain all the observed properties of the Fermi bubbles.

  Related Interests

  Testing whether jets from supermassive black holes can bias the measurements of galaxy cluster masses, which are crucial for determining the parameters of cosmic expansion

  Publications

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