Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Quasars, Einstein Spirals, and Compound Lenses: Connecting Black Hole Growth and Cosmology in the Rubin Observatory Era

Rodrigo Cordova Rosado is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), found deep in the center of galaxies, are thought to be powered by supermassive black holes (SMBH). Cordova Rosado will use upcoming surveys, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, to produce a robust AGN catalog. This catalog will be used to better understand the structure of the universe on large scales and better understand galaxy evolution.  The project will also partner with the Boston Museum of Science and other local organizations to improve and expand community science education in New England. The development of methods for modeling strong lenses with significant radial arcs will serve as a crucial tool for extending the study of SMBH-galaxy coevolution to earlier cosmic times, and to accurately constrain cosmological parameters in compound strong lenses. Cordova Rosado will combine different regimes of dark matter halo modeling to determine how SMBH evolve in our Universe, and their relation to its large-scale structure. This work will improve the understanding of the characteristic clustering strength for different AGN classes, analyze strong lenses to measure SMBH mass and cosmological parameters, and investigate how these populations are represented in physical models of SMBH evolution. The proposal explores the Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning technique "UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection)," a manifold learning technique, for dimension reduction.This research award is partially funded by a generous gift from Charles Simonyi to the U.S. NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Section of Astronomical Sciences. The project includes significant contributions to Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2602636 | Program: 4082CYXXDB NSF TRUST FUND,01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Rodrigo Cordova Rosado | Institution: Cordova, Rodrigo, Princeton, NJ | Award Amount: $330,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2602636 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2602636.html