Absorption of Gamma-Ray Bursts by Active Galactic Nuclei

This project has to deal with how radiation is affected as it travels through a dense volume of space, such as near the center of a galaxy. In these very dense environments, light that is emmitted from a source gets changed quite a bit before it reaches our telescope. There are a variety of things that could happen to the light, such as it could be absorbed and/or re-emitted. Since there are many things which could happen to the light on its way to our telescope, it is sometimes quite tricky for astronomers to figure out what emmitted the light that we observe. My project here is to use a radiative transfer code to figure out what our telescopes would observe if gamma rays were emmitted in the environment of an active galactic nucleus.

The more general goal here is to understand what it looks like when many gamma-ray bursts are all going off inside of a galaxy and their light is all getting absorbed and changed by the environment. Having a better grasp of this will help us to identify the cause of the variability we observe in active galactic nuclei luminosities. It is suspected that many gamma-ray bursts occurring inside of active galactic nuclei could provide enough luminosity to account for the observed variability which, to date, remains unexplained. For a deep-dive into my work, see the relevant paper here, or my master's thesis here.