Zooming Out: The Cosmic Web

Farhan Hasan ’18 wants to untangle the mysteries of the distant universe.

If you zoomed out on the entire universe, you’d find a network of interconnected spiderwebs: scattered strands called filaments and mostly empty voids tangled into what scientists call the cosmic web. Farhan Hasan ’18, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)—the operations hub for the Hubble, Webb, and Roman telescopes—studies how galaxies are influenced by this network.

At Reed, Farhan studied physics and music, participated in community engagement groups, and played bass in a band. He led his life with an interdisciplinary flair, which bled into the rest of his academic career. While an astronomy PhD student at New Mexico State University, he combined his love for astrophysics with his passion for data analytics as a lead developer on CosmoVis, an open-source 3-D data visualization and analysis software. Recently, he and NMSU colleagues merged their astronomical research with microbiology when they used slime molds to better understand galaxy formation—work that was featured in Scientific American in August.

Slime molds are single-celled organisms that push out their membranes to explore the space around them, changing course when they find food sources. These organisms, with their weblike formation, have been used in the past for projects like improving railway networks. Now, they’ve been used to map the universe, as Farhan and his team used a slime mold algorithm in a simulation to map connections between galaxies.

“What we found is that you actually are able to identify those large-scale filaments,” Farhan says. “They’re like highways of the universe. That gives us some super interesting insights into how galaxies are actually affected by their surroundings.” At the STScI, he works with the Hubble and Webb telescopes to study galaxies in the distant universe. It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream—Farhan always enjoyed following clues and solving mysteries. “And physics is like the grandest version of that, right?” he says.

Tags: Alumni, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Research