Petra Suková
email: petra.sukova@asu.cas.cz
phone: +420 226 258 422
Petra Suková is a postdoctoral researcher at Prague site of the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (group of Relativistic Astrophysics) since October 2016. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in 2013 for the thesis "Chaotic Motion around Black Holes" supervised by doc. Oldřich Semerák. She studied the onset of chaotic behaviour of test particles moving on the background metric describing the exact superposition of a static black hole surrounded by an additional source of the gravitational field, i.e. the massive disc or ring. She was interested in the way, how chaotic motion appears in the initially integrable system with the increasing strength of the perturbation (the mass, density profile and position of the disc/ring) and what different method of analysis can tell about the system.
After the defense of her thesis, she worked for 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow in the astrophysical group of prof. Janiuk at the Centre for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her main goal was to perform hydrodynamical simulations of low angular momentum accretion flows onto the black hole and to study the behaviour of the possible standing shocks in the flow. She was also interested in the timing properties of X-ray binaries, in particular, she was searching for traces of non-linear behaviour of microquasars in their X-ray light curves using the recurrence analysis.
Currently, she is working on general relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of accretion flows in different situations. Her main focus os on the topic of Repeating Nuclear Transients (RNTs), which are reccuring transient events seen mainly in X-rays in otherwise low active nuclei of nearby galaxies. Apart from repeating partial tidal disruptions (rpTDEs) also the Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs) and Quasi-Periodic Outflows are included in this cathegory. These peculiar sources show sudden flares with amplitudes as high as several hundreds on time scale from hours up to months. In some cases, instead of flares, quasi-periodic absorption events are seen, which corresponds to ultrafast outflows (UFOs) coming from the central engine and shielding our field of view. Petra Sukova and her coworkers are applying the model of a body transiting through accretion flow onto the central supermassive black hole to explain this rich phenomenology of the observed variability.