Nicholas Sorabella鈥檚 Research Could Aid in Discovery of Black Holes
Image by Brooke Coupal
08/04/2023
By Brooke Coupal
Nicholas Sorabella 鈥�21 is helping others unlock the mysteries of the universe.
The physics Ph.D. student is developing an easily accessible tool that could lead to discoveries of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. Sorabella鈥檚 research caught the attention of NASA, which recently awarded him a grant worth more than $47,000 through its (Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology) program.
鈥淥ne of NASA鈥檚 main missions is the understanding of the universe,鈥� says Antonino Cucchiara, the lead program scientist for FINESST鈥檚 Astrophysics Division. 鈥淣icholas鈥� work will be monumental in our advancement not only of the science but also because it will provide a powerful tool that will enable new discoveries after the grant is over.鈥�
The highly competitive grant program accepted 10% of applicants in the Astrophysics Division this year, Cucchiara says.
鈥淭he grant lets me focus entirely on my research for my last year as a Ph.D. student,鈥� Sorabella says. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 an honor to have the NASA logo behind it.鈥�
Helping Everyday People Become Astronomers
After Sorabella was accepted into 51视频鈥檚 physics graduate program, Assoc. Prof. Silas Laycock invited him to campus to talk about astronomy. Laycock told Sorabella about a puzzling binary system called IC 10 X-1, which consists of a black hole and a massive star. Scientists have been stumped trying to accurately calculate the mass of the pair.
鈥淎ll the standard methods for measuring the masses of the star and the black hole had given a very strange result, which we thought couldn鈥檛 possibly be right for various technical reasons,鈥� Laycock says.
Interested in finding a way to calculate the actual masses of the objects, Sorabella began to investigate. He learned of well-developed mathematics for a phenomenon known as gravitational self-lensing, in which a black hole acts as a magnifying glass when passing in front of a star, causing the star to appear brighter from our perspective. This lensing is a manifestation of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
鈥淭hat was very intriguing to me,鈥� Sorabella says. 鈥淔rom there, I started writing a computer code that could model this effect.鈥�
Sorabella鈥檚 model can be used to discover black holes and additional gravitational self-lensing objects such as and . Data from NASA鈥檚 Kepler Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite on light curves, which show the brightness of a star over time, can be input into his code. Peaks in the light curve could indicate that a black hole, neutron star or white dwarf, all of which are dense objects, passed in front of another star, intensifying its brightness. From these peaks, the model can then give estimates of the dense object鈥檚 mass, radius and other parameters.
