Create 2024-4-29-eht-story.md

2024-4-29-eht-story.md

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+
+---
+title: Junior researchers advance black hole research with OSPool open capacity
+
+author: Malia Bicoy
+
+publish_on:
+  - htcondor
+  - path
+  - osg
+  - chtc
+
+type: news
+canonical_url: " https://chtc.cs.wisc.edu/eht-story.html"
+
+image:
+  path: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/unnamed_01.png"
+  alt: EHT's first black image of Sgr A* utilizing polarized light.
+
+excerpt: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration furthers black hole research with a little help from the OSPool open capacity.
+
+---
+
+Some of the greatest scientists and researchers the world has ever seen made their greatest contributions before the age of thirty. 
+From Albert Einstein to Sir Isaac Newton, history shows that young scientists can greatly advance their field of research provided 
+they have the opportunity and resources to do so. The [Event Horizon Telescope](https://eventhorizontelescope.org) (EHT) Collaboration 
+— which is propelled forward by the innovative work of its junior researchers — is an example of young scientists at work making 
+important contributions to science.
+
+Postdoctoral fellow [Angelo Ricarte](https://bhi.fas.harvard.edu/people/angelo-ricarte/) and graduate students
+[Abhishek Josh](https://physics.illinois.edu/people/directory/profile/avjoshi2) and [Leon Chan](https://sites.google.com/view/leonastrophy/main?pli=1) 
+are three EHT junior researchers currently making waves in black hole research. The EHT Collaboration that these researchers contribute 
+to has been making advances in black hole research for over a decade. The collaboration’s goal is to capture detailed black hole images
+by creating a virtual earth-sized telescope. These images are then analyzed through running a multitude of simulations by replicating 
+the flow of matter and light in the warped space-time of a black hole.
+
+<figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-right: 1em">
+  <img src='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/Ricarte.jpg' height="300" width="300" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="Postdoctoral fellow Angelo Ricarte">
+  <figcaption class="figure-caption">Postdoctoral fellow Angelo Ricarte.
+<br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+Ricarte, Joshi, and other team members have recently focused on making images of the black holes through polarized light, which can help 
+create distinctions between simulations. With this new element, they must now consider another parameter for every step of the process. 
+What originally took 5 million computational tasks to perform the necessary simulations now takes around 20 million whilst considering polarized light.
+
+<figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-right: 1em">
+  <img src='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/Joshi.png' height="300" width="300" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="Graduate student Abhishek Joshi">
+  <figcaption class="figure-caption">Graduate Student Abhishek Joshi.
+<br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+That’s why the EHT collaboration looked toward the [Open Science Pool](https://osg-htc.org/services/open_science_pool) (OSPool) in 2022. 
+The OSPool provides open, freely available capacity available to any researcher affiliated with a U.S. institution, including junior 
+researchers, who typically have limited funding for computing. The open capacity of the OSPool can be a significant asset for young 
+researchers seeking to participate in cutting-edge research. “In the past, creating a whole new simulation library for even one additional 
+parameter would have been too time consuming.” Joshi explained, “Now, it’s actually possible to do it.”
+
+This capacity enabled Ricarte, one of the leads of two recent [collaborative papers](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad2df1) 
+dealing with the [telescope results](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad2df0), to make new discoveries. The papers unveil a new 
+black hole image that shows “strong and organized” magnetic fields spiraling from the edge of Sgr A*. This is the very first polarized image of Sgr A*, 
+and the magnetic field structure hints that strong magnetic fields may occur around all black holes. Ricarte stresses the important role polarized light 
+has played in a recent [press release](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-unveil-strong-magnetic-fields-spiraling-edge-milky-way%E2%80%99s-central-black-hole),
+noting that “Polarized light teaches us a lot more about the astrophysics, the properties of the gas, and mechanisms that take place as a black hole feeds.”
+
+<figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-right: 1em">
+  <img src='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/unnamed_01.png' height="500" width="500" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="EHT's first black image of Sgr A* utilizing polarized light.">
+  <figcaption class="figure-caption">EHT's first black image of Sgr A* utilizing polarized light.
+<br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+As the EHT provides more accurate observations, it also starts to unveil limitations of theory and simulations. Leon Chan, a graduate student in astrophysics 
+at the University of Colorado and a [Croucher Scholar](https://croucher.org.hk/en/funding/study_awards/scholarships), has been working on addressing such a 
+limitation identified by the EHT Collaboration. His research focuses on understanding why current black hole simulations twinkle much more than what is seen 
+from the EHT. Suspecting electron temperature, he and his collaborators decided to take pictures of the simulations with differing electron temperatures. This 
+required a large amount of calculations, and the OSPool was able to help with this problem as well. “It was out of the capability of traditional HPC,” 
+Chan said. In their  [recent publication](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad2454/meta), they discovered that the light ring of the black 
+hole was the major source of twinkling, and by making electrons cooler and the gas more opaque, he and his collaborators were able to block the light ring from twinkling.
+
+<figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-right: 1em">
+  <img src='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/Chan.jpg' height="300" width="450" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="Graduate student Leon Chan">
+  <figcaption class="figure-caption">Graduate Student Leon Chan.
+<br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+
+With capacity contributed by more than 50 institutions, many of which were granted awards by the [NSF CC* program](https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/campus-cyberinfrastructure-cc), 
+the EHT Collaboration has generated over 10 million black hole images and 5 million black hole spectra, taking an estimated 50 million core hours. This availability of open capacity
+has contributed to the ability of Ricarte, Joshi, Chan and others like them to make new discoveries early in their careers,
+equipping them to tackle some of the most challenging questions in astrophysics.