It’s hard to believe Teresita Ramirez Aguilar ever had a problem with math.
The research the junior physics major is doing on black holes and gravitational waves with Cal State Fullerton’s Gravitational Physics and Astronomy Center is getting the attention of the scientific community.
Her work using a supercomputer to create and visualize simulations of black holes crashing into each other and creating gravitational waves appears in a Dec. 3 announcement of four new gravitational-wave detections from black hole mergers by two major scientific groups, LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the European-based Virgo gravitational-wave detector.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light, stretching and squeezing the distances between things in their path, experts say.
Ramirez Aguilar, 24, said she didn’t take her interest in the cosmos seriously until she took an astronomy class at Long Beach City College.
“I fell in love with everything about the universe, and my professor at the time encouraged me to pursue it,” the Huntington Beach resident said.
Before that, Ramirez Aguilar said she worried that her math skills were lacking. In fact, when she expressed interest in taking a physics class in high school, an adviser discouraged her because of her issues with math, she said.
When she got to Cal State Fullerton she applied for a job as one of three student researchers with Geoffrey Lovelace, an associate professor of physics who specializes in black holes and gravitational waves.
“It took me a month to muster up the courage to ask him to let me do research with him,” she said of Lovelace. “And he gave me the opportunity of a lifetime. Here I am now learning about black holes and learning to code.”
And taking calculus 3, mathematical methods of physics and next spring, linear algebra.
Ramirez said she got tutoring help in math from Pathways to Independence, a nonprofit that helps women pursue a college education. And this semester she is a research scholar in CSUF’s Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program.
The science of gravitational waves is relatively new — although it was predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, Lovelace said. The first gravitational wave discovery was in 2015, and since then, 10 black hole mergers and one merger of neutron stars, which also creates gravitational waves, have been detected by LIGO and Virgo. The most recent one — detected in July 2017 — happened about 5 billion years ago, according to a new catalog of the events.
Cal State Fullerton has been involved in gravitational wave research since 2010, Lovelace said. CSUF is part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries.
Lovelace said he has been impressed with Ramirez Aguilar’s research.
“She works hard and she is patient and knows how to solve problems,” he said. “And now she is doing this great work that is a valuable part of my research group.”
Ramirez Aguilar used a computer code called the Spectral Einstein Code to solve the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. She ran calculations for the black hole mergers on CSUF’s supercomputer, called Orca, and combined them into one movie to illustrate the types of black holes LIGO has seen, as well as their shape and size, she said.
“We wanted to make something that can give people a quick impression of the different types of colliding black holes that LIGO has seen; not an artist’s impression but calculations using the Spectral Einstein Code,” Lovelace said.
Ramirez Aguilar, who plans to pursue a doctorate in physics, said she still finds it hard to wrap her head around the fact that “there are black holes out there.”
“I feel like it’s very important because it’s something we are just learning about,” she said about the research into gravitational waves.” It’s new research and we are going to discover so many things. This is something that was predicted and we have been able to prove it exists.”
CSUF News Service contributed to this story.