Seattle-area high school senior awarded $250,000 for gravitational wave research

 

Christine Ye, a senior at Eastlake High School in Sammamish, Wash., has won the top award in the nation’s oldest and most prestigious competitions for science students, thanks to her research into the mysteries of black holes and neutron stars.

 

“I’m totally in shock,” the 17-year-old told GeekWire after winning the $250,000 first-place award in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search. “It feels amazing.”

 

Ye was among 40 finalists honored on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., during a live-streamed awards ceremony that was emceed by “Saturday Night Live” cast member Melissa Villaseñor. More than $1.8 million in all was awarded to the finalists, who were evaluated on the basis of their projects’ scientific rigor and their potential to become scientific leaders.

 

Ye’s award-winning research is based on an analysis of readings from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, and addresses one of LIGO’s most puzzling observations.

 

In 2019, researchers at LIGO and at Europe’s Virgo gravitational-wave observatory detected ripples in spacetime that were caused by the collision of a black hole and a mystery object that was 2.6 times as massive as our sun. The mystery object’s size fell into a “mass gap” between the heaviest known neutron star and the lightest known black hole.

 

The analysis conducted by Ye and her co-author, Northwestern University postdoctoral fellow Maya Fishbach, determined that rapidly spinning neutron stars could get as massive as the mystery object. Their study will be the subject of a presentation next month in New York at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

 

It’s not possible to say definitively whether the object was a neutron star, Ye said, because “we don’t really know how fast it was spinning.” And because the two objects are now a single black hole, there’s no way to do follow-up observations.

 

“But my work does show that it’s possible, and that’s one way to explain it,” she said.

 

Ye said her opportunity to work with scientists at Northwestern University and with another team of researchers at the University of Washington at Bothell has been a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” that she’d recommend to other high-school students.

 

She still hasn’t decided where she’ll go to college after this spring’s graduation from Eastlake High, but she’s looking forward to focusing on physics and astrophysics — and wherever she ends up, the $250,000 will go a long way toward supporting her continuing education.

 

Working in gravitational-wave astronomy has been especially rewarding. “It’s a very young field,” she said. “It’s really nice to grow up with the field as it evolves.”

 

This year marks the 80th anniversary for the Science Talent Search, which is presented by the Society for Science and Regeneron Phamaceuticals.