Joel Edward Tohline (born July 15, 1953) is an American astrophysicist, specializing in computer simulation of complex fluid flows in astrophysical systems. [1]
Tohline went to high school in New Orleans. [2] He graduated in 1974 with a B.S. in physics from Centenary College of Louisiana and in 1978 with a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Santa Cruz. [3] His thesis is entitled Fragmentation of Rotating Protostellar Clouds. [4] As a postdoc he was from 1978 to 1980 a Willard Gibbs Instructor in Yale University's astronomy department and from 1980 to 1982 a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In Louisiana State University's department of physics and astronomy, he was from 1982 to 1986 an assistant professor, from 1986 to 1990 an associate professor, and from 1990 to 2002 a full professor and is since 2002 to the present Alumni Professor. In 1987 he used Blake Van Leer's invention for creating 3-dimensional hydrodynamic computer code. [5] While at LSU, he created numerous textbooks on mathematical tools and the physical concepts, white dwarfs and neutron stars. From 1994 to 1997 he was chair of the department. He was from January to May 2000 a visiting associate in astronomy at California Institute of Technology. From 2010 to the present he is the director of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology. [3]
Tohline is the author or coauthor of about 100 research articles. [1] In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [6]
Serpens is a constellation in the northern celestial hemisphere. One of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, it remains one of the 88 modern constellations designated by the International Astronomical Union. It is unique among the modern constellations in being split into two non-contiguous parts, Serpens Caput to the west and Serpens Cauda to the east. Between these two halves lies the constellation of Ophiuchus, the "Serpent-Bearer". In figurative representations, the body of the serpent is represented as passing behind Ophiuchus between Mu Serpentis in Serpens Caput and Nu Serpentis in Serpens Cauda.
A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's low luminosity comes from the emission of residual thermal energy; no fusion takes place in a white dwarf. The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star. There are currently thought to be eight white dwarfs among the hundred star systems nearest the Sun. The unusual faintness of white dwarfs was first recognized in 1910. The name white dwarf was coined by Willem Luyten in 1922.
In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are immensely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the most energetic and luminous electromagnetic events since the Big Bang. Bursts can last from ten milliseconds to several hours. After an initial flash of gamma rays, a longer-lived "afterglow" is usually emitted at longer wavelengths.
X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the donor, to the other component, called the accretor, which is very compact: a neutron star or black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays. The lifetime and the mass-transfer rate in an X-ray binary depends on the evolutionary status of the donor star, the mass ratio between the stellar components, and their orbital separation.
A stellar black hole is a black hole formed by the gravitational collapse of a star. They have masses ranging from about 5 to several tens of solar masses. The process is observed as a hypernova explosion or as a gamma ray burst. These black holes are also referred to as collapsars.
An astrophysical jet is an astronomical phenomenon where outflows of ionised matter are emitted as extended beams along the axis of rotation. When this greatly accelerated matter in the beam approaches the speed of light, astrophysical jets become relativistic jets as they show effects from special relativity.
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 Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit is an upper bound to the mass of cold, non-rotating neutron stars, analogous to the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarf stars. If the mass of a neutron star reaches the limit it will collapse to a denser form, most likely a black hole.
BD+17°3248 is an old Population II star located at a distance of roughly 968 light-years in the Galactic Halo. It belongs to the class of ultra-metal-poor stars, especially the very rare subclass of neutron-capture (r-process) enhanced stars.
4U 1700-37 is one of the stronger binary X-ray sources in the sky, and is classified as a high-mass X-ray binary. It was discovered by the Uhuru satellite. The "4U" designation refers to the fourth Uhuru catalog.
X Persei is a high-mass X-ray binary system located in the constellation Perseus, approximately 950 parsecs away. It is catalogued as 4U 0352+309 in the final Uhuru catalog of X-ray objects.
56 Ursae Majoris is a star in the constellation Ursa Major. Its apparent magnitude is 5.03. It is a single-lined spectroscopic binary with an orbital period of about 45 years. The companion star is likely a heavy neutron star born by a supernova that exploded around 100,000 years ago.
Adam Burrows is a noted professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University.
James Michael Lattimer is a nuclear astrophysicist who works on the dense nuclear matter equation of state and neutron stars.
Andrew Robert King, is a British astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. His previous institutions include University College London and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Hamburg and a visiting position at the Observatoire de Paris. He currently holds visiting positions at the Astronomical Institute of the University of Amsterdam, and he is a visiting professor at Leiden University. He has served as Editor and now is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the international astronomy journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A hypernova is a very energetic supernova thought to result from an extreme core-collapse scenario. In this case, a massive star collapses to form a rotating black hole emitting twin energetic jets and surrounded by an accretion disk. It is a type of stellar explosion that ejects material with an unusually high kinetic energy, an order of magnitude higher than most supernovae, with a luminosity at least 10 times greater. They usually appear similar to a type Ic supernova, but with unusually broad spectral lines indicating an extremely high expansion velocity. Hypernovae are one of the mechanisms for producing long gamma ray bursts (GRBs), which range from 2 seconds to over a minute in duration. They have also been referred to as superluminous supernovae, though that classification also includes other types of extremely luminous stellar explosions that have different origins.
Ramesh Narayan is an Indian-American theoretical astrophysicist, currently the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. Full member of the National Academy of Sciences, Ramesh Narayan is widely known for his contributions on the theory of black hole accretion processes. Recently he is involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project, which led in 2019 to the first image of the event horizon of a black hole.
Christopher John Pethick is a British theoretical physicist, specializing in many-body theory, ultra-cold atomic gases, and the physics of neutron stars and stellar collapse.
Madappa Prakash is an Indian-American nuclear physicist and astrophysicist, known for his research on the physics of neutron stars and heavy-ion collisions.