In this series of posts, we sit down with a few keynote speakers of the 247th AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here and read our other interviews here!
Background
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the hearts of galaxies, playing key roles in their evolution and star formation. Therefore understanding them is critical to understanding galaxies as a whole. One of the best people to talk to if you want to learn about how these factors connect in the grander scheme of galaxy evolution is Dr. Tonima Tasnim Ananna, a professor at Wayne State University, who focuses on constraining the accretion rate distribution of obscured AGN using data from Swift-BAT and BASS DR2. So ahead of her plenary talk, I chatted with Tonima to find out more about her, her research and any advice she might have for younger astronomers in the crowd.
Tonima became interested in astronomy at a very young age. “When I was six years old, Pathfinder landed on Mars and I remember this afternoon when [my mother] was telling me how they’ve landed a mission in Mars.” said Tonima. “And then she told me more about the cosmos, and I was like there’s so much space out there, clearly everything interesting is happening outside Earth! So, that’s when I thought, if I’m going to study anything, it must be this.”
Tonima received her B.A. in both Physics and Astronomy from Bryn Mawr College, afterwards she attended Yale where she received her Ph.D in Astronomy. After she received her doctorate, she completed a postdoc at Dartmouth before getting hired as a professor at Wayne State University in 2023.
Current Research
Boosted by recent observations from telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, supermassive black holes are a very active (pun intended) field of research in astronomy. But why do we need to study these objects? Tonima has many answers to that question.
“So, my research is about AGN, or the supermassive black holes that reside at the center of galaxies.” Said Tonima. “And they can regurgitate large amounts of energy into the galaxy, greater than the binding energy of galaxies. We have seen radiation coming from these black holes can shock the galactic system enough to cause star formation. And sometimes so much energy is released that gas reservoirs within the galaxy evaporates and then it quenches star formation. So, we want to study these powerful engines at the centers of galaxies because it of course is very closely tied up with our cosmic evolution.”
One of the key upsides of having a career in astronomy is seeing how different fields evolve and have major breakthroughs. “There have been so many,” said Tonima. “But my favorite ones are the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, which was incredible. And then the picture of the M87 black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope, which happened the year I was writing my thesis.”
When I asked Tonima what shee was thinking of talking about in her plenary, she said the following: “My plenary talk will be about like large scale surveys in astronomy, and what we have discovered after making all of these models of Eddington ratio, mass functions and luminosity functions, etc.. After all this stacking, what we have found? and where are the big gaps? As in this is what has been done, and this is where things are going in there! So that’s basically what my talk is going to be like: Astronomical modeling of large scale structures using all these surveys, what we know and what we don’t know so far.”
Advice for Early-Career Astronomers
To round out our interview, I asked Tonima whether she had any advice for undergraduates, or other early-career astronomers. “I think the most important thing you want to get is find a good supportive advisor. And you should look at the type of publications that advisor is creating. They should be an advisor who’s willing to send you to conferences and not put mental pressure on you about things like funding and all of that. And it has to be an advisor you like and who is nice.”
To learn more about current and future survey studies of AGN, be sure to attend Dr. Tonima Tasnim Ananna’s Plenary Lecture: Probing the Accretion History of AGN using X-ray and Multi-wavelength Surveys at 4:40 pm MST on Wednesday, January 7th at #AAS247!
Edited by: Kat Lee
Featured Image Credit: AAS
