Northeastern University astrophysicist Jonathan Blazek attributes his interest in the universe to his father, a native of rural Montana who loved that Big Sky country allowed him to simply look up at night and observe the stars, planets and galaxy.
Blazek “didn’t have quite the same night sky.”
“I grew up in Chicago,” Blazek says, wryly.
Is it any wonder then that Blazek’s work involves studying 95% of the universe that we cannot see?
“All the stars, all the gas, all the dust, all the galaxies are made up of this 5% that we can see, and we have to use that to infer the rest,” says Blazek, assistant professor of physics at Northeastern. “My research is focused on making this connection. How do we take the galaxies that we see and the properties of the galaxies that we see and use that to study the universe as a whole?”
Most recently, Blazek has focused on two main research questions: Where do galaxies form? And what are their shapes?
“Galaxies are not just perfect little points — they’re these very beautiful, complicated objects, and they have complex shapes,” Blazek says. “Exactly what their shape is and the way in which they are oriented is also going to depend on the structure in which they exist.”
Blazek suggests visualizing that structure as a complex web. The web is made up of dark matter — matter that we cannot see but know exists because (among several reasons) it gravitates, or pulls on, itself and visible matter in the universe. And that web is expanding faster and faster due to the force of dark energy, which acts like a form of energy we cannot see.
The problem is that we know very little about dark matter and dark energy — which together make up 95% of the universe.
“We think dark matter is some sort of particle, but we don’t know what kind of particle it is,” Blazek says. “Dark energy is truly weird. … We don’t know what it is.”
But by using a combination of “pen-and-paper” theory and machine learning and supercomputing, Blazek can simulate this web and predict where galaxies exist or will form and their shape.
“There’s a relationship where the more overall matter there is — the denser the region is — the more likely it is that you’re going to have a galaxy that forms there,” Blazek explains. “Moreover, there’s a relationship, which we are still trying to understand, between the properties of the overall structure in the universe and the way the galaxies are oriented and what their shapes are.”
This method of simulating and modeling the universe has caught the attention of other astrophysicists as Blazek has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation.
“We have great datasets which are coming online now and in the near future,” Blazek says, referencing the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. “The idea of the CAREER award is to take this methodology and actually make it work at the accuracy and scale to apply it to real data.”
“The work funded by this NSF CAREER award will increase our understanding of how galaxies connect to structure in the universe,” Blazek continues. “Providing powerful new tools to use with exciting data to answer some of the deepest questions in physics.”