Assistant Professor Peter Behroozi Wins Packard Fellowship
We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Peter Behroozi is part of a nationwide class of 22 early-career scientists to be awarded a Packard Fellowship. He is one of only four astronomers to get this five-year, $875000 award in 2019. You can read about the Packard HERE and Daniel Stolte's UANews story HERE.
Part of Peter's research will be to try to understand how supermassive black holes form so quickly in the early universe. Observations by others have shown that by the time the universe is 700 million years old (5% of its current age), there already exist supermassive black holes large enough to power the most luminous quasars. Current physical models simply cannot make such large black holes on the timescales that Nature does. Peter and his graduate student, Haowen Zhang, will attack this problem in the following way: "We are going to use our experience in creating millions of virtual universes containing billions of galaxies and apply it to generating new synthetic universes, this time filled with black holes," Peter says. "We will then compare our results to observational data of active, supermassive black holes and quasars at different times as well as to black holes closer to home."
Please join us in congratulating Peter. Peter joins Astronomy/Steward Professors Dennis Zaritsky (1997) and Xiaohui Fan (2004) as Packard winners.
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