Anne Murray Archibald is a Canadian astronomer known for her observations of pulsars [1] [2] [3] and as one of the developers of SciPy, a scientific programming library for the Python programming language.
Archibald did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Waterloo, including internships involving computer graphics and the image analysis of radar data. After doing a master's degree in pure mathematics at McGill University, she became a doctoral student of astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi at McGill, [4] and won both the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and the J.S. Plaskett Medal of the Canadian Astronomical Society for her 2013 doctoral dissertation, The End of Accretion: The X-ray Binary/Millisecond Pulsar Transition Object PSR J1023+0038. [4] [5]
After postdoctoral research at ASTRON and then at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, both in the Netherlands and supported by a Veni fellowship of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, [4] [6] [7] she was a senior lecturer at Newcastle University from 2019 to 2023. [6]
Henry Norris Russell ForMemRS HFRSE FRAS was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (1910). Russel is generally credited for discovering that stars are made primarily of Hydrogen, disproving the previous prevailing view about the composition of stars. However, this discovery was actually first observed and presented by Cecilia Payne in her 1925 doctoral thesis, the findings of which Russel had initially rejected before subsequently concluding that she was right four years later. In 1923, working with Frederick Saunders, he developed Russell–Saunders coupling, which is also known as LS coupling.
Nikolai Semyonovich Kardashev was a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and the deputy director of the Astro Space Center of PN Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the heavenly bodies, rather than their positions or motions in space–what they are, rather than where they are." Among the subjects studied are the Sun, other stars, galaxies, extrasolar planets, the interstellar medium and the cosmic microwave background. Emissions from these objects are examined across all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the properties examined include luminosity, density, temperature, and chemical composition. Because astrophysics is a very broad subject, astrophysicists apply concepts and methods from many disciplines of physics, including classical mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear and particle physics, and atomic and molecular physics.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.
Emma Vyssotsky was an American astronomer who was honored with the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1946.
Beta Cephei variables, also known as Beta Canis Majoris stars, are variable stars that exhibit small rapid variations in their brightness due to pulsations of the stars' surfaces, thought due to the unusual properties of iron at temperatures of 200,000 K in their interiors. These stars are usually hot blue-white stars of spectral class B and should not be confused with Cepheid variables, which are named after Delta Cephei and are luminous supergiant stars.
Bryan Malcolm Gaensler is an Australian astronomer based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies magnetars, supernova remnants, and magnetic fields. In 2014, he was appointed as Director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, after James R. Graham's departure. He was the co-chair of the Canadian 2020 Long Range Plan Committee with Pauline Barmby. In 2023, he was appointed as Dean of Physical and Biological Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.
Eric Ronald Priest is Emeritus Professor at St Andrews University, where he previously held the Gregory Chair of Mathematics and a Bishop Wardlaw Professorship.
2039 Payne-Gaposchkin, provisional designation 1974 CA, is a carbonaceous Themistian asteroid from the outer regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 14 kilometers in diameter. The asteroid was discovered on 14 February 1974, by astronomers at the George R. Agassiz Station of the Harvard College Observatory in Massachusetts, United States. It was named for British–American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
Victoria Michelle Kaspi is a Canadian astrophysicist and a professor at McGill University. Her research primarily concerns neutron stars and pulsars.
Adelaide Ames was an American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard University. She contributed to the study of galaxies with her co-authorship of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude, which was later known as the Shapley-Ames catalog. Ames was a member of the American Astronomical Society. She was a contemporary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and her closest friend at the observatory.
Neta Bahcall is an Israeli astrophysicist and cosmologist specializing in dark matter, the structure of the universe, quasars, and the formation of galaxies. Bahcall is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University.
Judith Gamora Cohen, is an American astronomer and the Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. She is a recognized expert regarding the Milky Way Galaxy, particularly with respect to the Galaxy's outer halo. She also played a key role in the design and construction of the Keck Telescope.
Chiara Mingarelli is an Italian-Canadian astrophysicist who researches gravitational waves. She is an assistant professor of physics at Yale University since 2023, and previously an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut (2020–2023). She is also a science writer and communicator.
Nan Dieter-Conklin, also known as Nannielou Reier Hepburn Dieter Conklin, was an American radio astronomer.
Florence Shirley Patterson Jones was a Canadian-born American astronomer.
Edith Jones Woodward was an American astronomer and college professor. She did research on binary stars, and taught at William Paterson College in New Jersey for over twenty years.
Gilles Fontaine was a professor of astrophysics at the Université de Montréal in Quebec, Canada.
Richard Van Evera Lovelace is an American astrophysicist and plasma physicist. He is best known for the discovery of the period of the pulsar in the Crab Nebula, which helped to prove that pulsars are rotating neutron stars, for developing a magnetic model of astrophysical jets from galaxies, and for developing a model of Rossby waves in accretion disks. He organized a US-Russia collaboration in plasma astrophysics, which focused on modeling of plasma accretion and outflows from magnetized rotating stars.