Bradley Schaefer

Last updated
Bradley Schaefer
Born
Bradley Elliott Schaefer
Nationality American
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1983)
Known for MIT Mystery Hunt, photometry
Awards Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, Gruber Prize in Cosmology, LSU University Alumni Professor, LSU Distinguished Faculty Award
Scientific career
Fields Astronomy
Institutions Louisiana State University (LSU)

Bradley Elliott Schaefer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983.

Contents

Early life

In addition to his academic pursuits, Schaefer is remembered at MIT as the founder of the annual MIT Mystery Hunt in 1981 during his graduate studies there. [1] [2] The tradition of the hunt continues today.

Scientific career

His research interests include the use of photometry of exploding objects to get results of interest for physical cosmology. He has also researched the dwarf planet Pluto with the aim of understanding the atmospheric variability of the system. Bradley has also studied KIC 8462852, a star with unusual within-day light fluctuations of about 20 percent, and found that the century-long light (1890 to 1989) from the star faded by about 20 percent as well, adding to its unusual luminosity. [3] [4]

Hipparchus's star catalog

In 2005, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, California, Schaefer reported on a potential link between the long-lost star catalog of Hipparchus and a sculpture called The Farnese Atlas, created in the 2nd century, and thus a potential source for antique astronomy. Hipparchus is considered to be one of the greatest astronomers of ancient times, but most of his works are lost to history. The Farnese Atlas depicts Atlas, from Greek mythology, bearing the weight of the heavens upon his shoulders. The heavens are represented by a globe showing the constellations as seen from Earth. By examining the positions of the constellations, Schaefer determined that they are accurately placed according to the positions they occupied at the time of Hipparchus. He concludes that Hipparchus's work may have been the reference for the statue.

Teaching

In 2017, Schaefer conducted the lecture series, "The Remarkable Science of Ancient Astronomy", an introductory course covering the history of astronomy, from about 5000 BC to 1600 AD on all inhabited continents. [5]

In 2010, Schaefer was awarded the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award as recognition of a sustained record of excellence in teaching and research. [6] In 2012, for his teaching, Schaefer was named as the University Alumni Professor. [7]

Awards

In 2007, Schaefer was awarded a small share of the $500,000 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, as part of the Supernova Cosmology Project, for the discovery of dark energy. [8] In 2015, for this discovery of dark energy, Schaefer again won a small share of the $3,000,000 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. [9] In October 2011, this work was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, with one half of the prize going to the head of the Supernova Cosmology Project, Saul Perlmutter, and the rest to the heads of a competing team. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Farnese Atlas</span> Ancient Roman statue of Greek Deity

The Farnese Atlas is a 2nd-century AD Roman marble sculpture of Atlas holding up a celestial globe. Probably a copy of an earlier work of the Hellenistic period, it is the oldest extant statue of Atlas, a Titan of Greek mythology who is represented in earlier Greek vase painting, and the oldest known representation of the celestial spheres and the classical constellations. The sculpture is at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, in Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saul Perlmutter</span> American astrophysicist and Nobel laureate (born 1959)

Saul Perlmutter is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard A. Muller</span> American physicist

Richard A. Muller is an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In early 2010, Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller founded the group Berkeley Earth, an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit aimed at addressing some of the major concerns of the climate change skeptics, in particular the global surface temperature record. In 2016, Richard and Elizabeth Muller co-founded Deep Isolation, a private company seeking to dispose of nuclear waste in deep boreholes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Ellis (astronomer)</span> Welsh astronomer

Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Star chart</span> Map of the night sky

A star chart is a celestial map of the night sky with astronomical objects laid out on a grid system. They are used to identify and locate constellations, stars, nebulae, galaxies, and planets. They have been used for human navigation since time immemorial. Note that a star chart differs from an astronomical catalog, which is a listing or tabulation of astronomical objects for a particular purpose. Tools using a star chart include the astrolabe and planisphere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Kirshner</span> American astronomer

Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.

The Supernova Cosmology Project is one of two research teams that determined the likelihood of an accelerating universe and therefore a positive cosmological constant, using data from the redshift of Type Ia supernovae. The project is headed by Saul Perlmutter at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with members from Australia, Chile, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Filippenko</span> American astrophysicist

Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, as well as on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe.

The High-Z Supernova Search Team was an international cosmology collaboration which used Type Ia supernovae to chart the expansion of the universe. The team was formed in 1994 by Brian P. Schmidt, then a post-doctoral research associate at Harvard University, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff, a staff astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The original team first proposed for the research on September 29, 1994 in a proposal called A Pilot Project to Search for Distant Type Ia Supernova to the CTIO. The original team as co-listed on the first observing proposal was: Nicholas Suntzeff (PI); Brian Schmidt (Co-I); R. Chris Smith, Robert Schommer, Mark M. Phillips, Mario Hamuy, Roberto Aviles, Jose Maza, Adam Riess, Robert Kirshner, Jason Spiromilio, and Bruno Leibundgut. The original project was awarded four nights of telescope time on the CTIO Víctor M. Blanco Telescope on the nights of February 25, 1995, and March 6, 24, and 29, 1995. The pilot project led to the discovery of supernova SN1995Y. In 1995, the HZT elected Brian P. Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo Observatory which is part of the Australian National University to manage the team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Riess</span> American astrophysicist (born 1969)

Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Schmidt</span> American-born Australian astrophysicist

Brian Paul Schmidt is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, making him the only Montana-born Nobel laureate.

The Gruber Prize in Cosmology, established in 2000, is one of three prestigious international awards worth US$500,000 awarded by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas B. Suntzeff</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Stubbs</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Calán/Tololo Survey</span>

The Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey was a supernova survey that ran from 1989 to 1995 at the University of Chile and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory to measure a Hubble diagram out to redshifts of 0.1. It was founded by Mario Hamuy, José Maza Sancho, Mark M. Phillips, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff in 1989 out of discussions at the UC Santa Cruz meeting on supernovae on how to improve the Hubble diagram using Type Ia supernovae. It was also motivated by the suggestion of Allan Sandage to restart a supernova survey after the Sandage and Tammann survey failed due to poor quality photographic plates in 1986. The Survey built on the original supernova survey of Maza done at the f/3 Maksutov Camera at the Cerro Roble Observatory of the University of Chile between 1979 and 1984. The Survey used the CTIO Curtis Schmidt telescope with IIa-O photographic plates, each plate covering a field of 25 sq-deg on the sky. The plates were developed and sent to Santiago Chile the next morning and searched for supernovae at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Chile. Any supernova candidates were then observed the next night using the 0.9m telescope at CTIO with a CCD camera. This was one of the first studies done in astronomy where the telescope time was scheduled to observe objects not yet discovered.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tabby's Star</span> Star noted for unusual dimming events

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References

  1. Marcott, Amy. "Happy 30…er…29th Birthday, Mystery Hunt!". Slice of MIT. MIT Alumni. Archived from the original on 28 August 2011. Retrieved 23 January 2012.
  2. Albert, Eric (July 1991). "The Great Annual MIT Mystery Hunt". Games. Retrieved 2007-08-16.
  3. Aron, Jacob (15 January 2016). "Comets can't explain weird 'alien megastructure' star after all". New Scientist . Retrieved 16 January 2016.
  4. Schaefer, Bradley E. (13 January 2016). "KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165+-0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989". The Astrophysical Journal. 822 (2): L34. arXiv: 1601.03256 . Bibcode:2016ApJ...822L..34S. doi: 10.3847/2041-8205/822/2/L34 . S2CID   118512449.
  5. Schaefer, Bradley E. "The Remarkable Science of Ancient Astronomy". The Great Courses. This is a 24-lecture series (30 minutes each) available on DVD or video download.
  6. LSU Distinguished Faculty Award [ permanent dead link ]
  7. "University Alumni Professor". Distinguished Professors. LSU.
  8. 2007 Gruber Prize to Supernova Cosmology Project and High-z Supernova Search Team
  9. "Saul Perlmutter and the Supernova Cosmology Project Team". Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize.
  10. 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to leaders of Supernova Cosmology Project and High-z Supernova Search Team