Aaron Parsons | |
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| Born | 1980 (age 43–44) Colorado, USA |
| Alma mater | Harvard University UC Berkeley |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Radio Astronomy, cosmology |
| Institutions | UC Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald Backer |
Aaron R. Parsons (born 1980) is an American astrophysicist who works primarily in the fields of radio astronomy instrumentation and experimental cosmology.
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Parsons was born in 1980. He grew up in Rangely, Colorado and graduated simultaneously from high school and from Colorado Northwestern Community College with an AS degree in 1998. He majored in physics and mathematics at Harvard University, and graduated with a BA in 2002. After working as a development engineer at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab from 2002 to 2004, Parsons entered graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in astronomy, receiving his PhD in 2009 while holding a predoctoral research position at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Parsons returned to UC Berkeley on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in 2009. He was hired as an assistant professor in the Astronomy Department and in the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at UC Berkeley in 2011. [1]
Parsons is the principal investigator of the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER) array, a radio interferometer designed to detect the first era of star formation, commonly called the Epoch of Reionization, via its effect on hydrogen in the intergalactic medium. [2] He specializes in digital signal processing instrumentation, and was one of the founding members of the Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER). [3]
In the fields of Big Bang theory and cosmology, reionization is the process that caused electrically neutral atoms in the universe to reionize after the lapse of the "dark ages".
The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), located near Narayangaon, Pune in India, is an array of thirty fully steerable parabolic radio telescopes of 45 metre diameter, observing at metre wavelengths. It is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope array in the world at low frequencies. It is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. It was conceived and built under the direction of Govind Swarup during 1984 to 1996. It is an interferometric array with baselines of up to 25 kilometres (16 mi). It was recently upgraded with new receivers, after which it is also known as the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT).
The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is a large radio telescope, with an antenna network located mainly in the Netherlands, and spreading across 7 other European countries as of 2019. Originally designed and built by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, it was first opened by Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands in 2010, and has since been operated on behalf of the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) partnership by ASTRON.
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), formerly known as the One Hectare Telescope (1hT), is a radio telescope array dedicated to astronomical observations and a simultaneous search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The array is situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Shasta County, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California.
Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) is a research management corporation that builds and operates facilities for the research community. It is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States. The current president is Adam Cohen. The corporation's major current operating unit is the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which it operates under a Cooperative Agreement with the National Science Foundation.
John Cromwell Mather is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements and preservation of the character of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Donald Charles Backer was an American astrophysicist who primarily worked in radio astronomy. Backer made important contributions to the understanding and study of pulsars, black holes, and the epoch of reionization.
MeerKAT, originally the Karoo Array Telescope, is a radio telescope consisting of 64 antennas in the Meerkat National Park, in the Northern Cape of South Africa. In 2003, South Africa submitted an expression of interest to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Radio Telescope in Africa, and the locally designed and built MeerKAT was incorporated into the first phase of the SKA. MeerKAT was launched in 2018.
Peter R. McCullough is an American astronomer, founder of the XO Project and discoverer of extrasolar transiting planets, such as XO-1b. Soon after the U.S. declassification of the laser beacon adaptive optics technique in 1991, he identified dusty disks around newborn stars, later referred to as proplyds, in observations of the Orion Nebula made with the Starfire Optical Range. Astronomers John Gaustad, McCullough, and David Van Buren with engineer Wayne Rosing mapped the entire southern sky in the hydrogen alpha transition with sufficient sensitivity for decontamination of the Milky Way from the cosmic microwave background. McCullough's modification to the Stromgren sphere model often produces more realistic results than the original.
The Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) was established by CSIRO in 2009. It lies in a designated radio quiet zone located near Boolardy Station in the Murchison Shire of Western Australia, about 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of Perth on the traditional lands of the Wajarri people.
The Donald C. Backer Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER) is a radio interferometer funded by the National Science Foundation to detect 21 cm hydrogen (HI) fluctuations occurring when the first galaxies ionized intergalactic gas at around 500 million years after the Big Bang. PAPER is a focused experiment aimed toward making the first statistical detection of the 21 cm reionization signal. Given the stringent dynamic range requirements for detecting reionization in the face of foregrounds that are five orders of magnitude brighter, the PAPER project is taking a carefully staged engineering approach, optimizing each component in the array to mitigate, at the outset, any potentially debilitating problems in subsequent data calibration and analysis. This staged approach addresses the observational challenges that arise from very-wide-field, high-dynamic-range imaging over wide bandwidths in the presence of transient terrestrial interference. PAPER began as a collaboration between Don Backer of the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Laboratory and Richard Bradley of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. With Backer's passing in 2010, Aaron Parsons has assumed leadership of PAPER on the side of UC Berkeley.
Wouthuysen–Field coupling, or the Wouthuysen–Field effect, is a mechanism that couples the excitation temperature, also called the spin temperature, of neutral hydrogen to Lyman-alpha radiation. This coupling plays a role in producing a difference in the temperature of neutral hydrogen and the cosmic microwave background at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the epoch of reionization. It is named for Siegfried Adolf Wouthuysen and George B. Field.
The Large-Aperture Experiment to Detect the Dark Ages (LEDA) is designed to detect the spectrum of the 21 cm Hydrogen line from the Intergalactic Medium (IGM) at redshifts of 15–30, when the Universe was just ~1% of its present age. It is located at the Long Wavelength Array site, adjacent to the Very Large Array. LEDA principally comprises a "large-N" array correlator, calibration & imaging system, and instrumentation for measurement of calibrated total-power. These systems will use the station 1 of the Long Wavelength Array as an aperture. LEDA is one of several efforts seeking to study cosmological reionization and the preceding Dark Ages. Others include the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER), Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), and Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT). LEDA will feature array-based calibration to improve the accuracy of foreground subtraction from the total-power signal. The project received funding from the National Science Foundation in August 2011.
The Radio Astronomy Lab (RAL) is an Organized Research Unit (ORU) within the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley. It was founded by faculty member Harold Weaver in 1958. Until 2012, RAL maintained a radio astronomy observatory at Hat Creek, near Mt. Lassen. It continues to support on-campus laboratory facilities in Campbell Hall. From 1998 to 2012, the RAL collaborated with the SETI Institute of Mountain View California to design, build and operate the Allen Telescope Array (ATA).
KAT-7 is a radio telescope situated in the Meerkat National Park, in the Northern Cape of South Africa. Developed as the precursor engineering test bed to the larger MeerKAT telescope, previously known as Karoo Array Telescope (KAT), it has become a science instrument in its own right. The construction was completed in 2011 and commissioning in 2012. It also served as a technology demonstrator for South Africa's bid to host the Square Kilometre Array. KAT-7 is the first Radio telescope to be built with a composite reflector and uses a stirling pump for 75 K cryogenic cooling. The telescope was built to test various system for the MeerKAT array, from the ROACH correlators designed and manufactured in Cape Town, now used by various telescopes internationally, to composite construction techniques.
The Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE) is a proposed NASA mission aimed at detecting redshifted line emissions from the earliest neutral hydrogen atoms, formed post-Cosmic Dawn. Emissions from these neutral hydrogen atoms, characterized by a rest wavelength of 21 cm and a frequency of 1420 MHz, offer insights into the formation of the universe's first stars and the epoch succeeding the cosmic Dark Ages. The intended orbiter aims to investigate the universe's state from approximately 80 million years to 420 million years post-Big Bang by capturing the line emissions at their redshifted frequencies originating from that period. Data collected by this mission is expected to shed light on the genesis of the first stars, the rapid growth of the initial black holes, and the universe’s reionization process. Moreover, it would facilitate the testing of computational galaxy formation models. Furthermore, the mission could advance research into dark matter decay and inform the development of lunar surface telescopes, enhancing the exploration of exoplanets around proximate stars.
The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) is a radio telescope dedicated to observing large scale structure during and prior to the epoch of reionization. HERA is a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) precursor instrument, intended to observe the early universe and to assist in the design of the full SKA. Along with MeerKAT, also in South Africa, and two radio telescopes in Western Australia, the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), the HERA is one of four precursors to the final SKA. It is located in the Meerkat National Park.
Lindsay Erin Glesener is a professor in the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Minnesota. She is a National Science Foundation CAREER Award researcher and lead investigator on the FOXSI Sounding Rocket.
Erika Tobiason Hamden is an American astrophysicist and associate professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet (UV) detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV/VIS) instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution. She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium (CGM). She is a 2019 TED fellow.
| Authority control databases: Academics |
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