Grant R. Tremblay | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Born | March 13, 1984 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Ph.D. Astrophysics, Rochester Institute of Technology |
Occupation | Astrophysicist |
Employer | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | |
Website | www |
Grant Tremblay (born March 13, 1984) is an American astrophysicist notable for research on supermassive black holes, science communication, and public advocacy for large space telescopes. He is currently an Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, [1] and was formerly a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, [2] a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and an Astronomer at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).
As of 2022, Tremblay is vice president of the American Astronomical Society, [3] a member of the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee, [4] and chair of the executive committee for NASA's Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group (PhysPAG). [5] He is an author on more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on star formation and supermassive black holes [6] as well as books for the general public including Light from the Void: Twenty Years of Discovery with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory [7] and What do Black Holes Eat for Dinner?. [8] [9]
Tremblay has appeared as a main cast member on various science documentary series including How the Universe Works , [10] and has given numerous presentations at universities, schools, and science festivals. He is head of the Lynx X-ray Observatory Science Study Office, and is a public advocate [11] for a new fleet of Great Observatories following release of the 2020 Decadal Survey in Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 2020 he founded the New Great Observatories community coalition to advocate for that fleet amongst stakeholders, U.S. policymakers, and the global public. [12] [13]
Tremblay was born in Brunswick, Maine, and graduated from Brunswick High School in 2002. His interest in astronomy and astrophysics was triggered by the 1994 Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact of Jupiter, and by using a small telescope in his backyard while growing up in Maine. [14] He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Rochester in 2006, and received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Astrophysics from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2011, [15] where his thesis work was conducted in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. His Doctoral advisors were Stefi Baum and Christopher O'Dea, and his Ph.D. Thesis was titled "Feedback Regulated Star Formation in Cool Core Clusters of Galaxies". [16]
Following receipt of his doctoral degree, Tremblay was a European Southern Observatory (ESO) Fellow in Garching, Germany and an Astronomer at ESO's Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile (from 2011 through 2014). He was then a NASA Einstein Fellow [2] at Yale University, working with Meg Urry.
In 2016, Tremblay and collaborators published a paper in the journal Nature reporting Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observations of cold molecular gas clouds falling toward a supermassive black hole in the brightest cluster galaxy of Abell 2597, a well known cool core cluster of galaxies. [17] The result received widespread media coverage. [18] Tremblay was also involved in the discovery of a possible runaway black hole [19] as well as the oldest black hole ever discovered. [20]
As of 2023, Tremblay works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he is the head of the Lynx X-ray Observatory science support office and supports flight operations for the Chandra X-ray Observatory. [1] In 2021, he was elected vice president of the American Astronomical Society (for a 2022–2025 term). [3] He is also a special government employee advising NASA's Astrophysics Division as part of the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee.
Tremblay is an author on more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in academic journals such as The Astrophysical Journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Nature, and Astronomy & Astrophysics, and he frequently collaborates with astronomers such as Françoise Combes, Andrew Fabian, and Megan Donahue.
Selected publications include:
Tremblay is also involved in science communication and outreach. He is the author of two books for the general public (Light from the Void: Twenty Years of Discovery with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory [7] and What do Black Holes Eat for Dinner?. [8] [9] ), and has appeared as a cast member on various documentary series about space and the universe, including Discovery and Science Channel 's How the Universe Works , Space's Deepest Secrets , and Nova.
Tremblay lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and three children.
A globular cluster is a spheroidal conglomeration of stars that is bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards its center. It can contain anywhere from tens of thousands to many millions of member stars, all orbiting in a stable, compact formation. Globular clusters are similar in form to dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and though globular clusters were long held to be the more luminous of the two, discoveries of outliers had made the distinction between the two less clear by the early 21st century. Their name is derived from Latin globulus. Globular clusters are occasionally known simply as "globulars".
Messier 87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that contains several trillion stars. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local universe, it has a large population of globular clusters—about 15,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting the Milky Way—and a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the core and extends at least 1,500 parsecs, traveling at a relativistic speed. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and a popular target for both amateur and professional astronomers.
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M☉). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*. Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is a Flagship-class space telescope launched aboard the Space ShuttleColumbia during STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64-hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2024.
Messier 61 is an intermediate barred spiral galaxy in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. It was first discovered by Barnaba Oriani on May 5, 1779, six days before Charles Messier discovered the same galaxy. Messier had observed it on the same night as Oriani but had mistaken it for a comet. Its distance has been estimated to be 45.61 million light years from the Milky Way Galaxy. It is a member of the M61 Group of galaxies, which is a member of the Virgo II Groups, a series of galaxies and galaxy clusters strung out from the southern edge of the Virgo Supercluster.
The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy. Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center. The Galactic Center is approximately 8 kiloparsecs (26,000 ly) away from Earth in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius, where the Milky Way appears brightest, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) or the star Shaula, south to the Pipe Nebula.
An intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) is a class of black hole with mass in the range of one hundred to one hundred thousand (102–105) solar masses: significantly higher than stellar black holes but lower than the hundred thousand to more than one billion (105–109) solar mass supermassive black holes. Several IMBH candidate objects have been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy and others nearby, based on indirect gas cloud velocity and accretion disk spectra observations of various evidentiary strength.
Sagittarius A*, abbreviated as Sgr A*, is the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south of the ecliptic, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) and Lambda Scorpii.
The Sombrero Galaxy is a peculiar galaxy of unclear classification in the constellation borders of Virgo and Corvus, being about 9.55 megaparsecs from the Milky Way galaxy. It is a member of the Virgo II Groups, a series of galaxies and galaxy clusters strung out from the southern edge of the Virgo Supercluster. It has an isophotal diameter of approximately 29.09 to 32.32 kiloparsecs, making it slightly bigger in size than the Milky Way.
Messier 77 (M77), also known as NGC 1068 or the Squid Galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus. It is about 47 million light-years (14 Mpc) away from Earth, and was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1780, who originally described it as a nebula. Méchain then communicated his discovery to Charles Messier, who subsequently listed the object in his catalog. Both Messier and William Herschel described this galaxy as a star cluster. Today, however, the object is known to be a galaxy. It is one of the brightest Seyfert galaxies visible from Earth and has a D25 isophotal diameter of about 27.70 kiloparsecs (90,000 light-years).
NGC 3621 is a field spiral galaxy about 22 Mly (6.7 Mpc) away in the equatorial constellation of Hydra. It was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel on 17 February 1790.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a telescope array consisting of a global network of radio telescopes. The EHT project combines data from several very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) stations around Earth, which form a combined array with an angular resolution sufficient to observe objects the size of a supermassive black hole's event horizon. The project's observational targets include the two black holes with the largest angular diameter as observed from Earth: the black hole at the center of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, and Sagittarius A*, at the center of the Milky Way.
Hercules A is a bright astronomical radio source in the constellation Hercules corresponding to the galaxy 3C 348.
Jacob Noel-Storr is an astrophysics researcher and science education and outreach specialist researcher, Presently the lecturer for practical astronomy and X-Lab-PAM team leader at the University of Groningen and president of InsightSTEM, Inc. He was an assistant research professor and director of the Insight Lab for Science Outreach and Learning Research at Rochester Institute of Technology, and assistant staff scientist in the Steward Observatory and Flandrau Science Center at the University of Arizona. He is known for contributions to the study of Active Galactic Nuclei / Supermassive Black Holes, as well as science / astronomy education and outreach.
Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
NGC 3862 is an elliptical galaxy located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. Discovered by astronomer William Herschel on April 27, 1785, NGC 3862 is an outlying member of the Leo Cluster.
NGC 541 is a lenticular galaxy located in the constellation Cetus. It is located at a distance of about 230 million light years from Earth, which, given its apparent dimensions, means that NGC 541 is about 130,000 light years across. It was discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest on October 30, 1864. It is a member of the Abell 194 galaxy cluster and is included in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies in the category galaxies with nearby fragments. NGC 541 is a radio galaxy of Fanaroff–Riley class I, also known as 3C 40A.
NGC 3585 is an elliptical or a lenticular galaxy located in the constellation Hydra. It is located at a distance of circa 60 million light-years from Earth, which, given its apparent dimensions, means that NGC 3585 is about 80,000 light years across. It was discovered by William Herschel on December 9, 1784.
NGC 545 is a lenticular galaxy located in the constellation Cetus. It is located at a distance of about 250 million light years from Earth, which, given its apparent dimensions, means that NGC 545 is about 180,000 light years across. It was discovered by William Herschel on October 1, 1785. It is a member of the Abell 194 galaxy cluster and is included along with NGC 547 in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.
ESO 383-76 is an elongated, X-ray luminous supergiant elliptical galaxy, residing as the dominant, brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) of the Abell 3571 galaxy cluster, the sixth-brightest in the sky at X-ray wavelengths. It is located at the distance of 200.6 megaparsecs from Earth, and is possibly a member of the large Shapley Supercluster. With a diameter of about 540.9 kiloparsecs, it is one of the largest galaxies known. It also contains a supermassive black hole, one of the most massive known with mass estimates varying from 2 billion M☉ to 28 billion M☉.