Mayura Balakrishnan

Rackham Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan

Welcome! I am a 4th year graduate student in the Astronomy program at the University of Michigan. 


My research is focused on X-ray views of the Galactic Center and supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. My most recent work is on modelling the Chandra high resolution of supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, comparing black hole accretion models to numerical simulations of the Wolf-Rayet winds in the central parsec. I am currently using signal separation techniques to separate overlapping extended objects with Chandra imaging data.


Preious work: I have experience observing stellar mass black holes using data from Swift, Chandra, NICER, and XMM-Newton. My past projects include analysis of the accretion disk wind of GRO J1655-40, the novel obscured state of GRS 1915+105, and the system consisting of black hole binary Swift J1728 and supernova remnant G351.9.


Please feel free to contact me at bmayura@umich.edu!

Recent Papers:

The Black Hole Candidate Swift J1728.9-3613 and the Supernova Remnant G351.9-0.9

M. Balakrishnan, P. A. Draghis, J. M. Miller, R. Fender, J. Bright, M. Ng, E. Cackett, A. Fabian, K. Kuntz, J. C. A. Miller-Jones, D. Proga, P. Ray, J. Raymond, M. T. Reynolds, A. Zoghbi (04/2023)

The Spin of a Newborn Black-Hole: Swift J1728.9-3613

P. A. Draghis, M. Balakrishnan, J. M. Miller, E. Cackett, A. Fabian, J. C. A. Miller-Jones, M. Ng, J. Raymond, M. T. Reynolds, A. Zoghbi (04/2023)

The Novel Obscured State of GRS 1915+105

M. Balakrishnan, J. M. Miller, M. T. Reynolds, E. Kammoun, A. Zoghbi, B. E. Tetarenko (03/2021)

An Obscured, Seyfert 2-like State of the Stellar-mass Black Hole GRS 1915+105 Caused by Failed Disk Winds  

 J. M. Miller, A. Zoghbi, J. Raymond,  M.Balakrishnan, L. Brenneman, E. Cackett, P. Draghis, A. C. Fabian, E. Gallo, J. Kaastra, T. Kallman, E. Kammoun, S. E. Motta, D. Proga, M. T. Reynolds, N. Trueba (11/2020)

Swift Spectroscopy of the Accretion Disk Wind in the Black Hole GRO J1655-40

M. Balakrishnan, J. M. Miller, N. Trueba, M. T. Reynolds, J. Raymond, D. Proga, A. C. Fabian, T. Kallman, J. Kaastra (04/2020)