Ilse Cleeves | |
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Alma mater | Rice University, BS University of Michigan, Ph.D. |
Awards | Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy Packard Fellowship |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of Virginia |
Thesis | Molecular Signposts of the Physics and Chemistry of Planet Formation (2015) |
Doctoral advisor | Edwin A. Bergin |
Lauren Ilsedore Cleeves is an American astrophysicist and an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. [1] She is specialized in the study of protoplanetary disks.
From 2015 to 2018, Cleeves was a Hubble Fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. [2] Before that, she received her PhD from the University of Michigan under supervision of Edwin Bergin.
She is an expert in astrochemical signatures of circumstellar disks. She studies the chemistry, composition, and structure of young planetary systems in formation around low-mass stars, using theoretical modelling and observations from Atacama Large Millimeter Array and Herschel Space Observatory. [3] [4] She has studied the origin of water on Earth. [5]
In 2018, Cleeves was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy "for her groundbreaking work on planet formation and protoplanetary disks". [6]
In 2019, Cleeves was awarded a Packard Fellowship [7]
Planetesimals are solid objects thought to exist in protoplanetary disks and debris disks. Believed to have formed in the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago, they aid study of its formation.
A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. The protoplanetary disk may not be considered an accretion disk, while the two are similar. While they are similar, an accretion disk is hotter, and spins much faster. It is also found on black holes, not stars. This process should not be confused with the accretion process thought to build up the planets themselves. Externally illuminated photo-evaporating protoplanetary disks are called proplyds.
A proplyd, short for ionized protoplanetary disk, is an externally illuminated photoevaporating protoplanetary disk around a young star. Nearly 180 proplyds have been discovered in the Orion Nebula. Images of proplyds in other star-forming regions are rare, while Orion is the only region with a large known sample due to its relative proximity to Earth.
Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. She was nearly deaf throughout her career after 1893, as a result of scarlet fever. She was a suffragist and a member of the National Women's Party.
TW Hydrae is a T Tauri star approximately 196 light-years away in the constellation of Hydra. TW Hydrae is about 80% of the mass of the Sun, but is only about 5-10 million years old. The star appears to be accreting from a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, oriented face-on to Earth, which has been resolved in images from the ALMA observatory. TW Hydrae is accompanied by about twenty other low-mass stars with similar ages and spatial motions, comprising the "TW Hydrae association" or TWA, one of the closest regions of recent "fossil" star-formation to the Sun.
Catharine "Katy" D. Garmany is an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. She holds a B.S. (astrophysics), 1966 from Indiana University Bloomington; and a M.A. (astrophysics), 1968, and Ph.D. (astronomy), 1971, from the University of Virginia. Catharine's main areas of research are massive stars, evolution and formation; astronomical education.
Amy J. Barger is an American astronomer and Henrietta Leavitt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is considered a pioneer in combining data from multiple telescopes to monitor multiple wavelengths and in discovering distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, which are outside of the visible spectrum. Barger is an active member of the International Astronomical Union.
Lisa Jennifer Kewley is an Australian Astrophysicist and current Director of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Previously, Kewley was Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3-D and ARC Laureate Fellow at the Australian National University College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, where she was also a Professor. Specialising in galaxy evolution, she won the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2005 for her studies of oxygen in galaxies, and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 2008. In 2014 she was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2020 she received the James Craig Watson Medal. In 2021 she was elected as an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2022 she became the first female director of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Daniel Apai is a professor and astrophysicist at The University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. He is known for his studies of astrobiology, extrasolar planets, and the formation of planetary systems. He is the principal investigator of the Earths in Other Solar Systems team of NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Studies and the Hubble Space Telescope Cloud Atlas Treasury program, and Project EDEN, a large survey for habitable planets in the immediate solar neighborhood. He is leading the Nautilus Space Observatory space telescope concept and co-leading the technology development underpinning it.
Sarah Dodson-Robinson is an American astronomer known for her work on planet formation and an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware.
Karin Ingegerd Öberg is a Swedish astrochemist. She is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and leader of the Öberg Astrochemistry Group at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Her research concerns star formation, planet formation, and stellar evolution in relation to organic molecules, which are necessary to determine the origins of life on Earth and elsewhere. In April 2015, her group discovered the first complex organic molecule in a protoplanetary disk.
Emily Levesque is an American astronomer, author, and associate professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. She is renowned for her work on massive stars and using these stars to investigate galaxy formation. She is also the author of three books, including the 2020 popular science book The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers.
Smadar Naoz is an Israeli-American astrophysicist, and was the 2015 winner of the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy for her scientific contributions to the fields of cosmology and planetary dynamics.
Elizabeth Lada is an American astronomer whose self-described research interests include "understanding the origin, properties, evolution and fate of young embedded clusters within molecular clouds".
Rebekah Dawson is an American astrophysicist and a former associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on simulating the evolution of exoplanetary orbits and compositions to better understand how planetary systems form.
PDS 70 is a very young T Tauri star in the constellation Centaurus. Located 370 light-years from Earth, it has a mass of 0.76 M☉ and is approximately 5.4 million years old. The star has a protoplanetary disk containing two nascent exoplanets, named PDS 70b and PDS 70c, which have been directly imaged by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. PDS 70b was the first confirmed protoplanet to be directly imaged.
Joan R. Najita is an American astronomer and Chief Scientist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
Blakesley Burkhart is an astrophysicist. She is the winner of the 2017 Robert J. Trumpler Award awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, which recognizes a Ph.D. thesis that is "particularly significant to astronomy." She also is the winner of the 2019 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy and the 2022 winner of The American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award. The awards both cited her work on magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, and for developing innovative techniques for comparing observable astronomical phenomena with theoretical models.
Kevin France is an astrophysicist and assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado. His research focuses on exoplanets and their host stars, protoplanetary disks, and the development of instrumentation for space-borne astronomy missions.
Paola Andrea Pinilla Ortiz is a Colombian astrophysicist whose research concerns the accretion of interplanetary dust clouds into protoplanetary disks as part of the formation of exoplanets. Educated in Colombia and Germany, she works in England as associate professor in exoplanets at the University College London Department of Space & Climate Physics, affiliated with the university's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.