Professor of Physics and Astronomy Daniel Proga was just awarded one of NASA's most prestigious research grants through the Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Networks (TCAN) program. The grant totals $1,547,537 and will be shared with 4 other major research institutions: the Institute for Advanced Study, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, The University of Virginia, and the Flatiron Institute at the Center for Computational Astrophysics.
Professor Proga is the principal investigator and hence UNLV will be the head node of this network collaboration to advance the state of the art in modeling accretion processes in astrophysics. Specifically, the collaboration will develop algorithms and perform supercomputer simulations to understand exactly how the atmospheres of turbulent accretion disks should appear observationally, according to theory. It is well known that disk atmospheres around systems such as supermassive black holes and low mass X-ray binaries can be unbound, forming accretion disk winds. Professor Proga has spent much of his career understanding such disk winds, and this emphasis is apparent in the name of the collaboration: A New DAWN (Disk Accretion and Winds Network). The name also reflects the ambitious goals of the project, as the resulting modeling capability is expected to usher in a new dawn in understanding the physics of how matter is accreted and ejected from black holes, neutron stars, and newly born stars. The full UNLV team consists of Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and co-investigator Zhaohuan Zhu, Postdoctoral Researcher Tim Waters (who earned his PhD from UNLV in 2017), and graduate students Randall Dannen and Shalini Ganguly. This major grant will provide funding support for this team for a period of three years in addition to supporting two other postdoctoral researchers and several graduate students at the partnering research institutions.
