Christopher Kochanek

Last updated

Christopher Kochanek is an American astronomer. He works in the fields of cosmology, gravitational lensing, and supernovae. Kochanek currently is an Ohio Eminent Scholar at Ohio State University as well as an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [1] [2] [3]

In 2020, he was the recipient of the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize with Krzysztof Stanek for their leadership of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae ASAS-SN), [4] [5] [6] in addition to the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. [7]

Related Research Articles

The Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize is awarded every other year by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of an outstanding research contribution to astronomy or astrophysics of an exceptionally creative or innovative character. The prize is named in honor of the cosmologist and astronomer Beatrice Tinsley.

Beatrice Tinsley New Zealand astronomer

Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley was a British-born New Zealand astronomer and cosmologist and professor of astronomy at Yale University, whose research made fundamental contributions to the astronomical understanding of how galaxies evolve, grow and die.

NGC 6946

NGC 6946, also known as the Fireworks Galaxy or Caldwell 12, is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group, but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.

Robert Kirshner American astronomer

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.

Adam Riess

Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and 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.

Nicholas B. Suntzeff

Nicholas B. Suntzeff is an American University Distinguished Professor and holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Observational Astronomy in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he is Director of the Astronomy Program. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astronomical instrumentation. With Brian Schmidt he founded the High-z Supernova Search Team, which was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 to Schmidt and Adam Riess.

Supernova impostor

Supernova impostors are stellar explosions that appear at first to be a supernova but do not destroy their progenitor stars. As such, they are a class of extra-powerful novae. They are also known as Type V supernovae, Eta Carinae analogs, and giant eruptions of luminous blue variables (LBV).

Puckett Observatory

Puckett Observatory is a private astronomical observatory located in the state of Georgia. It is owned and operated by Tim Puckett. Its primary observation goals are the study of comets and the discovery of supernovae. To facilitate the latter goal it sponsors the Puckett Observatory World Supernova Search whose astronomers have discovered 369 supernovae.

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.

W. David Arnett American astrophysicist

William David Arnett is a Regents Professor of Astrophysics at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, known for his research on supernova explosions, the formation of neutron stars or black holes by gravitational collapse, and the synthesis of elements in stars; he is author of the monograph Supernovae and Nucleosynthesis which deals with these topics. Arnett pioneered the application of supercomputers to astrophysical problems, including neutrino radiation hydrodynamics, nuclear reaction networks, instabilities and explosions, supernova light curves, and turbulent convective flow in two and three dimensions.

Robert Williams (astronomer)

Robert Williams is an astronomer who served as the Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) from 1993 to 1998, and the President of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) from 2009 to 2012. Prior to his work at STScI, he was a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson for 18 years and the Director of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory from 1986 to 1993.

ASASSN-15lh 2015 hypernova event in the constellation Indus

ASASSN-15lh is an extremely luminous astronomical transient discovered by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN), with the appearance of a superluminous supernova event. It was first detected on June 14, 2015, located within a faint galaxy in the southern constellation Indus, and was the most luminous supernova-like object ever observed. At its peak, ASASSN-15lh was 570 billion times brighter than the Sun, and 20 times brighter than the combined light emitted by the Milky Way Galaxy. The emitted energy was exceeded by PS1-10adi.

The All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) is an automated program to search for new supernovae and other astronomical transients, headed by astronomers from the Ohio State University, including Christopher Kochanek and Krzysztof Stanek. It has 20 robotic telescopes in both the northern and southern hemispheres. It can survey the entire sky approximately once every day.

Martin C. Weisskopf

Dr. Martin C. Weisskopf is project scientist for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Chief Scientist for X-ray Astronomy in the Space Sciences Department at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is an American planetary scientist known for studying planet formation, planetary geology, and materials science. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. She was a professor at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2014.

Vicky Kalogera Greek astrophysicist

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.

V407 Lupi Nova that occurred in 2016

V407 Lupi, also known as Nova Lupi 2016, was a bright nova in the constellation Lupus discovered by All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) on 24.00 September 2016. At the time of its discovery, it had an apparent visual magnitude of 9.1. The ASAS-SN team reported that no object at the nova's location brighter than magnitude 17.5 was seen on images taken four days earlier. Wildly incorrect coordinates were published in the announcement telegram, but corrected in a subsequent telegram. It reached a peak brightness of magnitude 5.6, faintly visible to the naked eye, on 25 September 2016.

NGC 4076 Galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices

NGC 4076 is a spiral galaxy located 290 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The galaxy was discovered by astronomer William Herschel on April 27, 1785 and is a member of the NGC 4065 Group.

Krzysztof Stanek is an observational astrophysicist and Professor and University Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State University. He was named a University Distinguished Scholar in 2018. His research focus is on the explosive deaths of massive stars.

References

  1. "Christopher Kochanek". aaas.org. Retrieved May 13, 2017.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. "Christopher Kochanek". osu.edu. Retrieved May 13, 2017.
  3. "Christopher Kochanek". ohio-state.edu. Retrieved May 13, 2017.
  4. "ASAS-SN's Homepage". www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  5. "Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize | American Astronomical Society". aas.org. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  6. "American Astronomical Society Names Recipients of 2020 Awards And Prizes". www.spaceref.com. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  7. "American Astronomical Society Names Recipients of 2020 Awards And Prizes". www.spaceref.com. Retrieved 2020-11-01.