This article needs to be updated.(January 2024) |
Joss Bland-Hawthorn | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | British-Australian |
Citizenship | Australian, British |
Known for | Galactic archaeology Near-field cosmology Galaxia simulator Astronomical instrumentation Astrophotonics: photonic lantern |
Awards | ARC Federation Fellow Professorship (2007) Muhlmann Award (ASP) (2011) Jackson-Gwilt Medal (RAS) (2012) ARC Laureate Professor of Astrophysics (2014) WH Steel Medal (Australian Optical Society) (2015) Peter McGregor Team Prize (ASA (2016) New South Wales Scientist of the Year (2016) Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal (AAS (2017) HiCi Laureate and Australian Research Leader (2019-20) Walter Boas Medal (AIP) (2020) Doctor Honoris Causa, Université d’Aix-Marseille (2022) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Astrophysics Photonics and optics |
Institutions | Royal Greenwich Observatory Institute for Astronomy, Hawaii Rice University, Texas Anglo-Australian Observatory, Sydney The University of Sydney |
Thesis | The Structure and Dynamics of Ionised Gas within NGC 5128 (Centaurus A) (1986) |
Website | www |
Jonathan (Joss) Bland-Hawthorn (born 31 May 1959 in Ide Hill, Kent, England) is a British-Australian astrophysicist. He is a Laureate professor of physics at the University of Sydney, and director of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.
Bland-Hawthorn was born 31 May 1959 in Ide Hill, Kent, England. [1] He was educated at Kingham Hill School (1970–1977). [2] He earned a degree in computer science, mathematics, and physics at the University of Birmingham before pursuing his PhD in astrophysics and astronomy at the University of Sussex and the Royal Greenwich Observatory. [3] [4] His dissertation, The Structure and Dynamics of the Ionised Gas within NGC 5128 (Centaurus A), was completed and approved in 1986. [5] [6]
In 1985, Bland-Hawthorn took a three-year postdoctoral position studying astrophysics at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. [7] In 1988, he briefly did research at Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and the Space Telescope Science Institute before accepting a tenured professorship at Rice University in the space, physics, and astronomy department. [8] [7] [1] He held this role until 1993, when he took another research fellowship, this time at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. [1] Later that year, he moved to Australia and joined the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney as a physicist until 2000, when he became the Head of Instrument Science. [7] [1] [9] He was awarded with an ARC Federation Fellow Professorship in 2007 and left the Observatory to teach physics and work as Director of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA) within the University of Sydney's School of Physics. [10] [1] In 2008, he was given the Muhlmann Award from the ASP and shared the inaugural Group Achievement Award from the Royal Astronomical Society with 32 colleagues including John A. Peacock, Warrick Couch, and Karl Glazebrook. [11] [12]
In 2009, he co-founded the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), a collaborative group of physicists, electrical engineers, mathematicians, and chemists. [13] The following year, he was Leverhulme Professor and visiting fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 2011, he was a Brittingham Scholar at the University of Wisconsin. [14] [15] Bland-Hawthorn was awarded the Jackson-Gwilt Medal in 2012 by the Royal Astronomical Society and was made a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Optical Society of America. [16] [1] He became an ARC Laureate Fellow in 2014 and received the W.H. Steel Medal from the Australian and New Zealand Optical Society in 2015. [17] In 2016, he was presented with the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellence in Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Chemistry and Physics for the development of the Galactic Archaeology survey, [18] and the Astronomical Society of Australia's Peter McGregor Team Prize. [1] In 2017, he was given the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal by the Australian Academy of Science for the development of the fields astrophotonics and galactic archaeology. [19] He worked at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 as a visiting Miller Professor and is the sixth Australian to receive this honour. [20] In 2019-21, he was a HiCi Laureate/Australian Research Leader in astronomy and astrophysics and the highest ranked physicist in Australia by Research.com. [21] In 2021, he was awarded the Walter Boas Medal by the AIP and granted a visiting professor fellowship at École normale supérieure in Paris. [21] In 2022, he was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Aix-Marseille and honoured by Anti-slavery Australia for his collaborative work on novel ways to track modern slavery in supply chains.
He is the Project Scientist and founder of the Sydney Astrophotonic Instrumentation Lab (SAIL) and the Director of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, both at the University of Sydney. [22] [23] He was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. [24] Bland-Hawthorn sits on several boards, including: Astronomy Australia Limited, The Australis Board, and the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. [15]
Bland-Hawthorn first coined the term "near-field cosmology," which looks at the early physical histories of stars and galaxies, in his Nature article Clues to galaxy formation and in 2002 co-wrote an Annual Review article with Ken Freeman giving a more detailed description of this topic. [25] [26] [27] [28] The Annual Review paper additionally introduces galactic archaeology, chemical tagging, and the use of high spectroscopic resolution to conduct mass star surveys. [25] [29] [30] [9] This technology has been in use since 1993 and still plays a large part in surveys such as the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), Gaia-ESO (GES), Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), the William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE), and 4MOST, as well as the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) with which he is involved. [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] In 2011, Bland-Hawthorn, Sanjib Sharma, Kathryn Johnston, and James Binney developed Galaxia, a galaxy model simulation code. [37] In 2016, he and Ortwin Gerhard were able to identify properties of the Milky Way that could act as a fossil record. [38] [39] [40]
Bland-Hawthorn is particularly interested in the Milky Way. [41] In 2003, he and Martin Cohen wrote about the galaxy's bipolar x-ray wind, which they spotted using the ROSAT satellite; this theory was not proven until 2010. [42] [43] Bland-Hawthorn continues to write about simulated galactic winds [44] and Smith's Cloud. [45] He wrote several articles showing that high-velocity HI clouds are within the Galactic halo rather than at megaparsec distances as originally thought. [46] [47] [48] He was also the first to show that the HI disc in the outer parts of spiral galaxies undergoes a phase change and becomes ionized. [49]
In 2000, he established the field of astrophotonics.[ citation needed ] Among the many technologies and instruments he has worked on and developed over his career are the photonic lantern, OH-suppression fibres, hexabundles, and the photonic integrated multimode microspectrograph; all of these also have applications in other fields. [50] [51] [52] [53] Bland-Hawthorn's experimental work in 2021 focuses on exploratory use of quantum technologies in the field of astronomy. [54] [55] [56] He and colleagues John Bartholomew and Matt Sellars proposed that quantum memories at different telescopes can be combined to perform very-long-baseline interferometry at infrared wavelengths. [54]
Bland-Hawthorn has more than 1,000 publications and has been cited upwards of 65,000 times according to ResearchGate. [57]
His main research interests include:
He and his wife Sue have two sons Christian and Luke. [58]
A globular cluster is a spheroidal conglomeration of stars that is bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards their centers. They 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 the distinction between the two is not always clear. 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.
In 1944, Walter Baade categorized groups of stars within the Milky Way into stellar populations. In the abstract of the article by Baade, he recognizes that Jan Oort originally conceived this type of classification in 1926.
Nucleocosmochronology or nuclear cosmochronology is a technique used to determine timescales for astrophysical objects and events.
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.
Centaurus A is a galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus. It was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop from his home in Parramatta, in New South Wales, Australia. There is considerable debate in the literature regarding the galaxy's fundamental properties such as its Hubble type and distance. NGC 5128 is one of the closest radio galaxies to Earth, so its active galactic nucleus has been extensively studied by professional astronomers. The galaxy is also the fifth-brightest in the sky, making it an ideal amateur astronomy target. It is only visible from the southern hemisphere and low northern latitudes.
Sagittarius A*, abbreviated 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 63 or M63, also known as NGC 5055 or the seldom-used Sunflower Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici with approximately 400 billion stars. M63 was first discovered by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain, then later verified by his colleague Charles Messier on June 14, 1779. The galaxy became listed as object 63 in the Messier Catalogue. In the mid-19th century, Anglo-Irish astronomer Lord Rosse identified spiral structures within the galaxy, making this one of the first galaxies in which such structure was identified.
The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
A low-ionization nuclear emission-line region (LINER) is a type of galactic nucleus that is defined by its spectral line emission. The spectra typically include line emission from weakly ionized or neutral atoms, such as O, O+, N+, and S+. Conversely, the spectral line emission from strongly ionized atoms, such as O++, Ne++, and He+, is relatively weak. The class of galactic nuclei was first identified by Timothy Heckman in the third of a series of papers on the spectra of galactic nuclei that were published in 1980.
In cosmology, galaxy filaments are the largest known structures in the universe, consisting of walls of galactic superclusters. These massive, thread-like formations can commonly reach 50/h to 80/h Megaparsecs —with the largest found to date being the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall at around 3 gigaparsecs (9.8 Gly) in length—and form the boundaries between voids. Due to the accelerating expansion of the universe, the individual clusters of gravitationally bound galaxies that make up galaxy filaments are moving away from each other at an accelerated rate; in the far future they will dissolve.
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 5643 is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Lupus. Based on the tip of the red-giant branch distance indicator, it is located at a distance of about 40 million light-years. NGC 5643 has an active galactic nucleus and is a type II Seyfert galaxy.
NGC 5965 is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Draco. It is located at a distance of circa 150 million light years from Earth, which, given its apparent dimensions, means that NGC 5965 is about 260,000 light years across. It was discovered by William Herschel on May 5, 1788.
NGC 4800 is an isolated spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici, located at a distance of 95 megalight-years from the Milky Way. It was discovered by William Herschel on April 1, 1788. The morphological classification of this galaxy is SA(rs)b, indicating a spiral galaxy with no visual bar at the nucleus (SA), an incomplete ring structure (rs), and moderately-tightly wound spiral arms (b). The galactic plane is inclined to the line of sight by an angle of 43°, and the long axis is oriented along a position angle of 25°. There is a weak bar structure at the nucleus that is visible in the infrared.
NGC 3175 is a spiral galaxy located in the far eastern part of the southern constellation of Antlia at an approximate distance of 54 million light-years. NGC 3175 was discovered on March 30, 1835 by English astronomer John Herschel, whose notes described it as, "considerably bright, large, much extended NE-SW, very gradually little brighter middle". This galaxy is the namesake of the NGC 3175 group of galaxies, which includes the spiral galaxy NGC 3137.
We're very proud of Hillian Joss Bland-Hawthorn (1970-77) for this outstanding achievement