Jacob Tutterow

About Me

I'm in my second year of Georgia State University's master's program in astronomy. I also did my undergraduate at GSU, making this my sixth year here! I've been involved in several research projects, along with teaching seven labs so far. I started at GSU working with Dr. Megan Connors, helping to construct the wonderful sPHENIX particle detector, now measuring the most extreme state of matter in the universe (quark-gluon plasma) at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). After four years of sPHENIX research, I swapped over to astronomy for my graduate studies.

I have two primary projects I've worked on as an astronomer. The first is working with Dr. Jane Pratt at Lawrence Livermore National Lab on hydrodynamic simulations of stellar interiors. The second is with Dr. Mike Crenshaw, where I've investigated outflows coming from supermassive black holes accreting material in nearby Seyfert galaxies. I've also done some N-Body simulations of planetary systems with Dr. Idan Ginsburg, looking at both exomoon stability in compact planetary systems and the potential spread of life via impacts on the dwarf planet Ceres.

Outside of academics, I'm an avid music listener and enjoy going to shows at the various wonderful venues around Atlanta. I also enjoy going on walks when the Georgia weather is gracious enough, watching movies, and playing TTRPGs.

Email: jtutterow1@gsu.edu

Research

I've been invloved in several research projects since starting my undergraduate degree at Georgia State University in 2019. I'm primarily interested galaxy evolution, AGN, and the intersection of theory/observations in these fields.

With Dr. Mike Crenshaw, I've been investigating outflows from the active galactic nucleus (AGN) of NGC 3516 (pictured above, credit: Judy Schmidt). As a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of a galaxy accretes material, it produces a huge amount of energy as the accretion disc heats up. This creates an AGN, which can cause material close by it to be pushed throughout the galaxy.

These outflows are thought to be the link between the mass of the SMBH and the mass of the galaxy, which seems to be correlated. NGC 3516 is a particularly interesting case to study, as it is one of the original Seyfert galaxies discovered in 1948, and it has been highly variable. I've used Apache Point Observatory's ARC 3.5m telescope to get 2D spectra at several position angles to measure these outflows, by looking at the doppler-broadened emission lines ([OIII], [NII], Hβ, Hα). These data are being used along with archival data from Hubble Space Telescope, which can get a closer look at the nucleus of NGC 3516.

From these data, we have made a new model of the shape of these outflows in the narrow-line region, along with modeling the radiative driving of the AGN on narrow-line region clouds. These results are currently being written up into a paper, to be submitted to ApJ.

With Dr. Jane Pratt, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, I've looked 2D hydrodynamic simulations of stellar interiors, made with the MUltidimensional Stellar Implicit Code (MUSIC). An example simulation is pictured in the above image. These simulations model convection in stars, and we are testing the boundary layer effects of the outer convective envolope on the radiative core.

In more simplistic 1D models, like MESA, the overshooting of plasma from the convection zone into the radiative core is modeled with mixing length theory. We are trying to improve this, as this process is much more complex. We are using fluid dynamics boundary layer solutions to test the amount of overshooting and the thickness of the boundary layer. We test for these effects by simulating stars with radiative zones ('open boundary' simulations) and comparing them to simulations with a hard barrier at the radiative zone ('closed boundary' simulations).

By quantifying all of this, we can improve our models for chemical mixing, magnetic field generation, and stellar evolution in general. These results are being written up into a paper, to be submitted to A&A.

During my undergraduate degree, I worked with Dr. Megan Connors for four years on the sPHENIX detector, which is an updated version of the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (PHENIX) detector. I began the week I started undergrad, and ended the week I graduated! sPHENIX is now installed in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), and measuring the most extreme state of matter in the universe--quark gluon plasma (QGP). QGP has temperatures of ~4 trillion Kelvin, which is the only environment where quarks can experience 'asymptotic freedom', which gives us the most direct experimental evidence of how the strong force works.

RHIC can produce QGP by speeding up heavy ions to ~99.9999% the speed of light and colliding them, producing huge showers of particles that can be measured to reconstruct the QGP that existed for a fraction of a second.

The main goal of this project was to characterize the performance of scintillating tiles, which measure the energies of hadrons resulting from these collisions. Over 16,000 of these tiles were tested in our lab over the course of four years, and we sucessfully kept construction of sPHENIX on track through the pandemic (amongst other challenges!). All of those tiles are now being hopelessly irradiated in the blue ring pictured above.

sPHENIX is a huge international collaboration, and though it didn't directly deal with astronomy, there were some connections! This is because millionths of seconds after the Big Bang, the universe existed as QGP. The interiors of neutron stars are also theorized to have high enough temperatures and pressures to be QGP.

Teaching

At GSU, I've taught several lab sections of our introductory astronomy courses (ASTR1010: Astronomy of the Solar System & ASTR1020: Stellar and Galactic Astronomy). For students, information on labs can be accessed here.

All labs are held in Langdale Hall, in Room 720 (ASTR1010) and Room 721 (ASTR1020). Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Curriculum Vitae

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