Abby Tejera
MIT Department: Physics
Faculty Mentor: Anna-Christina Eilers
Undergraduate Institution: Oberlin College
Hometown: Punta del Este, Uruguay
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Abby Tejera is a rising senior double majoring in Physics and Computer Science at Oberlin College. She is a student representative of the Physics and Astronomy department and a member of her college’s Computer Science Majors Committee. She is a co-founder of Bridging Resources and Access to Nurture Community Through Holistic Engagement in STEM (BRANCHES), a committee that fosters diversity and inclusion in STEM. She has conducted research on metallicities in different galaxies in Professor Scudder’s laboratory. She also did research at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) under the mentorship of Dr. Gabriela González. Abby is currently doing research at MIT under the mentorship of Dr. Anna-Christina Eilers in astronomy. Abby aspires to do a PhD in Physics/Astronomy and continue working to foster diversity and inclusion in STEM and contribute to the community. Abby enjoys participating in community service initiatives such as the Bonner Scholars Program.
Abstract
Measuring the Clustering Properties of Quasars Observed with the Gaia
Space Satellite
Abby Tejera1 and Anna-Christina Eilers2
1Physics and Astronomy Department, Oberlin College
2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In this research project we worked on measuring the clustering properties of quasars observed with the Gaia space satellite, in order to study the properties of the dark matter halos that host these luminous quasars across cosmic time. To do this we utilize a catalog of quasars called Quaia, with data from the Gaia space mission. This catalog covers more than 6 million quasars all over the sky which is the largest collection of these objects to date. Quaia allows us to measure the auto-correlation function of these objects, and we use a Python package called Corrfunc to perform these calculations, which can tell us information on the distance between quasars. From this we can derive a typical dark matter halo mass in which these quasars reside as well as other properties. Knowing the number density of quasars and of dark matter halos that host them allows us to derive the fraction of cosmic time that galaxies shine as luminous quasars, which is the quasars’ duty cycle. This duty cycle is a very interesting quantity to understand on what timescales supermassive black holes form and grow.
