The American Astronomical Society is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the AAS is to promote the advancement of astronomy and closely related branches of science, while the secondary purpose includes enhancing astronomy education and providing a political voice for its members through lobbying and grassroots activities. Its current mission is to enhance and share humanity's scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community.
A pulsar is a highly magnetized rotating compact star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles. This radiation can be observed only when a beam of emission is pointing toward Earth, and is responsible for the pulsed appearance of emission. Neutron stars are very dense and have short, regular rotational periods. This produces a very precise interval between pulses that ranges from milliseconds to seconds for an individual pulsar. Pulsars are one of the candidates for the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
Michael S. Turner is a theoretical cosmologist, who coined the term dark energy in 1998. He is the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and was formerly the Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation from 2003–2006. His book The Early Universe, co-written with fellow Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb and published in 1990, is a standard text on the subject.
A millisecond pulsar (MSP) is a pulsar with a rotational period less than about 10 milliseconds. Millisecond pulsars have been detected in radio, X-ray, and gamma ray portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The leading theory for the origin of millisecond pulsars is that they are old, rapidly rotating neutron stars that have been spun up or "recycled" through accretion of matter from a companion star in a close binary system. For this reason, millisecond pulsars are sometimes called recycled pulsars.
The Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics is jointly awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics for outstanding work in astrophysics. It is funded by the Heineman Foundation in honour of Dannie Heineman.
Frank H. Shu, is an American astrophysicist, astronomer and author. He is currently a university professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego.
Robert Charles Kennicutt, Jr. FRS is an American astronomer. He is a former Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal (1999–2006) and became a co-editor of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics as of 2021. His research interests include the structure and evolution of galaxies and star formation in galaxies.
Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clowes 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.
David Nathaniel Spergel, is an American theoretical astrophysicist. He is President of the Simons Foundation and the Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He founded the Center for Computational Astrophysics and served as its first director. Spergel is known for his work on the WMAP mission. Spergel is a MacArthur Fellow. He was a member of the NASA Advisory Council and chair of the Space Studies Board. He was once the W.M. Keck distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He was part of the team that originated the WMAP mission and designed the spacecraft, and has worked on deciphering the data that it beams back from space. Spergel is playing a leading role in developing the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a multibillion-dollar space mission planned for launch in the mid-2020s. He shared the 2010 Shaw Prize in astronomy with Charles L. Bennett and Lyman Alexander Page, Jr. for their work on WMAP. He shared the 2015 Dannie Heineman Prize with Marc Kamionkowski "for their outstanding contributions to the investigation of the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background that have led to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe".
Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni is a US-based astronomer born and raised in India. He is currently a professor of astronomy and planetary science at California Institute of Technology, and he served as director of Caltech Optical Observatory (COO) at California Institute of Technology, in which capacity he oversaw the Palomar and Keck among other telescopes. He is the recipient of a number of awards and honours.
Irwin Ira Shapiro is an American astrophysicist and Timken University Professor at Harvard University. He has been a professor at Harvard since 1982. He was the director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1982 to 2004.
Scott Duncan Tremaine is a Canadian-born astrophysicist. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada and the National Academy of Sciences. Tremaine is widely regarded as one of the world's leading astrophysicists for his contributions to the theory of Solar System and galactic dynamics. Tremaine is the namesake of asteroid 3806 Tremaine. He is credited with coining the name "Kuiper belt".
Roger David Blandford, FRS, FRAS is a British theoretical astrophysicist, best known for his work on black holes.
Bruce T. Draine is an American astrophysicist.
PSR B1937+21 is a pulsar located in the constellation Vulpecula a few degrees in the sky away from the first discovered pulsar, PSR B1919+21. The name PSR B1937+21 is derived from the word "pulsar" and the declination and right ascension at which it is located, with the "B" indicating that the coordinates are for the 1950.0 epoch. PSR B1937+21 was discovered in 1982 by Don Backer, Shri Kulkarni, Carl Heiles, Michael Davis, and Miller Goss.
Lennox Lauchlan Cowie FRS is a British astronomer, and professor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii.
Lars Bildsten is an American astrophysicist, best known for his work on the physics of white dwarfs and their explosions as Type Ia supernovae. He is the sixth director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and a professor in the UCSB Physics Department.
Chryssa Kouveliotou is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at George Washington University and a retired senior technologist in high-energy astrophysics at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Vassiliki Kalogera is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at Northwestern University and the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is a leading member of the LIGO Collaboration that observed gravitational waves in 2015.
