Sean Ressler is a postdoctoral fellow at CITA working on general relativistic and Newtonian simulations of black hole accretion. The motivation of his work is to make these simulations more realistic by incorporating more physics, more observational input, or connecting smaller scales to larger scales (or vice versa). Sean's personal favourite black hole is the supermassive Sagittarius A* in the centre of our galaxy, though he is not opposed to studying other systems! Sean is also broadly interested in may topics related to black hole accretion including jets and plasma physics.
Title: Full of Hot Air: A Smörgåsbord of Results From Wind-Fed GRMHD Simulations of Sagittarius A*
Abstract: Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is of significant interest to the astrophysical community as a natural laboratory due to its proximity and relatively high angular resolution in the sky. This is true now more than ever given the exciting recent results from the Event Horizon Telescope and the GRAVITY interferometer. Our understanding of Sgr A* has been greatly aided by the hundreds, if not thousands of general relativistic simulations with which it has been modeled. Yet there still remain many open questions. One way to make progress is to connect horizon-scale observations to Bondi-scale observations using nested, multi-scale simulations. These simulations take into account observationally-motivated feeding of Sgr A* from nearby stellar winds and extend over 6 orders of magnitude in radius. Despite having relatively few free parameters, the simulations that I will present can match reasonably well several independent observational probes. These new results can provide insight into tilted accretion disks/jets, jet propagation, the rotation measure of Sgr A*, and more.