The Perseus Cluster: As the brightest galaxy cluster in our X-ray sky, Perseus is a prime laboratory for studying the intracluster medium (ICM, shown in the figure to the right), which is the super-heated gas that fills the entire cluster. Because galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the universe, they are extremely sensitive to the underlying cosmology---the evolution of the universe--- and the ICM encodes hidden information about this evolutionary history. My work studying the ICM of the Perseus Cluster can be found here.

Active Galactic Nuclei: when the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies accrete new material, they become very luminous across wavelengths. We call these bright objects Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), and they are thought to have a central influence on the evolution of galaxies. By tracking the X-ray properties of AGN in the JWST-Time Domain field near the North Ecliptic Pole (NEP; see Zhao et al. 2021), we can learn about the structure of the region closest to the black hole (shown to the right) and peer into the co-evolution between black holes and their host galaxies. Find out more by visiting my AAS poster from the January 2024 meeting.