Joseph R. Farah

Intro

Places to find me: on top of Lizard's Mouth Rock, stargazing; at the Las Cumbres Observatory on a Friday night, working on a publication; at the gym early in the morning, starting the day off right; walking along Goleta Beach Park, working on a new art piece; in a nook at the Davidson Library, banging my head against some problem.

My Work

Picture: The imaging team of the EHT, which made the famous first picture of a black hole, standing with an early version of the image at the 2018 EHT Imaging Workshop. I am second from the left on the right side of the image.

Curriculum Vitae

About

Currently, I am a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Andy Howell under an NSF Fellowship at UC Santa Barbara. Through my work, I aim to develop a deeper understanding of the mass-loss mechanism in Type IIb supernovae and its implications on stellar evolution and galactic chemical enrichment.

I was on the team that took the first image of a black hole, at the time the first and only undergraduate. I received a B.S. in physics at the University of Massachusetts Boston (class of 2021). I have co-authored over 50 publications as of August 2023; given many talks on my work with the Event Horizon Telescope; and have developed new ways to model and image the black hole shadow in Kerr. I've had the privilege of working under the legendary Melissa Franklin and the brilliant Michael Johnson.

I am an NSF Fellow and a 2019 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar, the first from my alma mater UMass Boston, and was named the winner of the 2021 LeRoy Apker Award (as well as finishing in the final 7 in 2020), the highest honor given to undergraduate physics researchers in the United States. Selected awards include: the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, the NSF Diamond Achievement Award, the Northrop-Grumman Scholarship, and the Alton J. Brann Endowed Scholarship. Fellowships I have received include the Smithsonian Graduate Fellowship (2x) and the Oracle Fellowship (2x). I was named one of Boston's annual 25 Under 25.

For fun, I enjoy making art, quarter-mile drag racing, exercising, and working on unnecessary tech projects. But more than anything else, I enjoy a good laugh.

Supernova

Source: Hosseinzadeh & Farah et al. (2023). The Type II supernova SN 2023ixf, the closest supernova in 15 years.

Type IIb supernovae are the result of a core-collapse explosion of a massive star that has shed almost all of its hydrogen envelope. The mechanism by which the hydrogen envelope is shed is not well-understood and could be explained by several different channels (e.g., stellar wind, binary stripping, precursor eruption], etc.) which are challenging to constrain observationally. Understanding this mass-loss mechanism is a crucial topic of interest. Doing so will improve our understanding of the evolution of massive stars, globally improve stellar evolution models, and shed light on the feedback mechanisms that drive the chemical enrichment of galaxies and the interstellar medium.

I will contribute to solving this problem throughout my PhD in three ways. First, I will contribute to the continued cataloging of Type IIb supernovae by leading campaigns to observe and classify new Type IIb supernovae that occur during the course of my PhD. This will help improve the diversity of the existing catalog of Type IIb supernovae and identify patterns and discrepancies in their progenitor systems. Second, I will contribute to the modeling of Type IIb supernovae explosions by extending and testing the full scope of existing models on new and unpublished observations. This survey will help determine the extent to which models differ from each other in various scenarios. Finally, I will contribute to our theoretical understanding of Type IIb supernovae by extending the existing theory to identify observational signatures that upcoming missions and surveys could detect. This work will provide a powerful direction and motivation to focus imminent projects (e.g., ULTRASAT) on Type IIb supernovae.

I am conducting my Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara in Fall 2021, working with Dr. Andy Howell and the Global Supernova Project, trying to shed light on tihs cosmic mystery.

Black holes

Source: The first image of a black hole. With the EHT Collaboration, I helped produce this image of the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87.

When observed against an illuminating background screen, black holes cast a unique shadow on the accreting material around them. The shape and size of this shadow correlates to the spin, inclination, and mass of the black hole, and allows for an extremely unique test of general relativity in the strong gravity regime.

Unfortunately, the shadow of a black hole is frustratingly small, even for the biggest black holes on the sky. However, with very-long-baseline interferometery (VLBI) and special imaging algorithms, we can produce radio wavelength images of this shadow and reveal the singularity.

While I worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory under Michael Johnson, I was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration that took the famous first image of M87. During that time, I authored and co-authored many publications addressing black hole physics and the imaging problem. I continued my work and in 2022 helped produce the second image of a black hole--the first of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

Cosmology

Contact

Swing by for a cup of Joe, or send me an email!

• GitHub
• Linkedin
• Scholar

Elements

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