Michael Blanton

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Michael R. Blanton (born 1 February 1973) is an American physicist whose expertise is in the fields of galaxy evolution and cosmology. [1] A professor in New York University's department of physics, Blanton has primarily focused on mapping the Universe.

Contents

Career

A former postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab, he was part of a team that constructed the largest-ever three-dimensional map, produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, of massive galaxies and distant black holes using data from the Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. His work with the survey concentrated on the properties of galaxies and how the galaxies that exist in massive "clusters" of galaxies differ from those that are isolated from their neighbors. [2] [3] The SDSS map helps the investigation of the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up 96 percent of the universe—and allow scientists to retrace the history of the universe over the last 11 billion years.

Blanton has also helped to develop a new prism spectroscopy technique to obtain large numbers of redshifts of very distant galaxies to determine how galaxies have changed over the past eight billion years. The work was completed as part of the multi-institutional PRIMUS project. [4] [5]

Blanton directs Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV, which will create a comprehensive spectroscopic map of the Milky Way, provide spatially resolved spectroscopy for 10,000 nearby galaxies, and create the largest volume map of the distant universe ever made.

Honors

Asteroid 140980 Blanton, discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Apache Point Observatory in 2001, was named in his honor. [1] The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 6 April 2012 ( M.P.C. 79105). [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quasar</span> Active galactic nucleus containing a supermassive black hole

A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses, surrounded by a gaseous accretion disc. Gas in the disc falling towards the black hole heats up because of friction and releases energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The radiant energy of quasars is enormous; the most powerful quasars have luminosities thousands of times greater than that of a galaxy such as the Milky Way. Quasars are usually categorized as a subclass of the more general category of AGN. The redshifts of quasars are of cosmological origin.

Peculiar motion or peculiar velocity refers to the velocity of an object relative to a rest frame — usually a frame in which the average velocity of some objects is zero.

In the fields of Big Bang theory and cosmology, reionization is the process that caused electrically neutral atoms in the universe to reionize after the lapse of the "dark ages".

Redshift quantization, also referred to as redshift periodicity, redshift discretization, preferred redshifts and redshift-magnitude bands, is the hypothesis that the redshifts of cosmologically distant objects tend to cluster around multiples of some particular value.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">APM 08279+5255</span> Quasar

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyman-alpha emitter</span>

A Lyman-alpha emitter (LAE) is a type of distant galaxy that emits Lyman-alpha radiation from neutral hydrogen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SDSSJ0946+1006</span>

SDSSJ0946+1006 is an unusual gravitational lens system consisting of three galaxies at distances of respectively three, six, and eleven billion light years from Earth. In a report presented at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, researchers Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Santa Barbara described the discovery of a double Einstein ring produced by the gravitational lensing of light from two distant galaxies. The observations were made using the Hubble Space Telescope.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weak gravitational lensing</span>

While the presence of any mass bends the path of light passing near it, this effect rarely produces the giant arcs and multiple images associated with strong gravitational lensing. Most lines of sight in the universe are thoroughly in the weak lensing regime, in which the deflection is impossible to detect in a single background source. However, even in these cases, the presence of the foreground mass can be detected, by way of a systematic alignment of background sources around the lensing mass. Weak gravitational lensing is thus an intrinsically statistical measurement, but it provides a way to measure the masses of astronomical objects without requiring assumptions about their composition or dynamical state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pea galaxy</span> Possible type of luminous blue compact galaxy

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">MACS0647-JD</span> The farthest known galaxy from the Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cluster Lensing and Supernova survey with Hubble</span>

The Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) was a program on the Hubble Space Telescope to observe 25 massive galaxy clusters. CLASH was one of three programs selected in the first class of Hubble multi-cycle treasury programs, which were designed to tackle large questions unanswerable through normal observations. Observations for CLASH were conducted between November 2010 and July 2013. CLASH was led by principal investigator Marc Postman, and had a science team of over 40 researchers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">U1.11</span> Large quasar group in the constellation Virgo

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Void (astronomy)</span> Vast empty spaces between filaments with few or no galaxies

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Idit Zehavi is an Israeli astrophysicist and researcher who discovered an anomaly in the mapping of the cosmos, which offered insight into how the universe is expanding. She is part of the team completing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is one of the world's most highly cited scientists according to the list published annually by Thomson Reuters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NGC 708</span> Galaxy in the constellation Andromeda

NGC 708 is an elliptical galaxy located 240 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda and was discovered by astronomer William Herschel on September 21, 1786. It is classified as a cD galaxy and is the brightest member of Abell 262. NGC 708 is a weak FR I radio galaxy and is also classified as a type 2 Seyfert galaxy.

Sangeeta Malhotra is an astrophysicist who studies galaxies, their contents, and their effects on the universe around them. The objects she studies range from our own Milky Way galaxy to some of the earliest and most distant known galaxies in the epoch of cosmic dawn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GLASS-z12</span> Lyman-break galaxy that is one of the oldest galaxies known

GLASS-z12 is a Lyman-break galaxy discovered by the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) observing program using the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam in July 2022. Spectroscopic observations of GLASS-z12 by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in August 2022 confirmed that the galaxy has a spectroscopic redshift of 12.117±0.012, making it one of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever discovered, dating back to just 350 million years after the Big Bang, 13.6 billion years ago. ALMA observations detected an emission line associated with doubly ionized oxygen at 258.7 GHz with a significance of 5σ, suggesting that there is very low dust content in GLASS-z12, if not the early universe as well. Also based on oxygen-related measurements, the age of the galaxy is confirmed.

References

  1. 1 2 "140980 Blanton (2001 VQ132)". Minor Planet Center. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
  2. Blanton, Michael R.; Lupton, Robert H.; Schlegel, David J.; Strauss, Michael A.; Brinkmann, J.; Fukugita, Masataka; et al. (September 2005). "The Properties and Luminosity Function of Extremely Low Luminosity Galaxies". The Astrophysical Journal. 631 (1): 208–230. arXiv: astro-ph/0410164 . Bibcode:2005ApJ...631..208B. doi:10.1086/431416.
  3. Blanton, Michael R.; Moustakas, John (September 2009). "Physical Properties and Environments of Nearby Galaxies". Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 47 (1): 159–210(AnnualReviewsHomepage). arXiv: 0908.3017 . Bibcode:2009ARA&A..47..159B. doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101734.
  4. Coil, Alison L.; Blanton, Michael R.; Burles, Scott M.; Cool, Richard J.; Eisenstein, Daniel J.; Moustakas, John; et al. (November 2011). "The PRIsm MUlti-object Survey (PRIMUS). I. Survey Overview and Characteristics". The Astrophysical Journal. 741 (1): 15. arXiv: 1011.4307 . Bibcode:2011ApJ...741....8C. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/741/1/8.
  5. Cool, Richard J.; Moustakas, John; Blanton, Michael R.; Burles, Scott M.; Coil, Alison L.; Eisenstein, Daniel J.; et al. (April 2013). "The PRIsm MUlti-object Survey (PRIMUS). II. Data Reduction and Redshift Fitting". The Astrophysical Journal. 767 (2): 17. arXiv: 1303.2672 . Bibcode:2013ApJ...767..118C. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/767/2/118.
  6. "MPC/MPO/MPS Archive". Minor Planet Center. Retrieved 14 August 2019.