ANGELO RICARTE
Supermassive Black Hole Theorist
ABOUT ME
Welcome! I am a second-generation Filipino-American astrophysicist from La Mirada, CA. I'm currently a Black Hole Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. I completed my Ph.D at Yale University with Priya Natarajan, and now work mainly within the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and with Ramesh Narayan.
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I study the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes using computer simulations. Supermassive black holes can be found at the center of every galaxy, and are important for regulating star formation. It's a tough problem spanning many orders of magnitude in spatial scale. If you replaced the sun with the black hole at the center of our galaxy (known as Sgr A*), its event horizon wouldn't even cross Mercury's orbit. Meanwhile, its growth rate depends on physics unfolding all the way out on galactic scales, such as the eventual merger between our galaxy and Andromeda! That's why I work on supermassive black holes on all spatial scales: from the Event Horizon Telescope to cosmological simulations.
RESEARCH
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) makes resolved images of black holes at the centers of galaxies. I use general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations to make theoretical predictions for these observations.
