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.
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.
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]
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 accretion onto 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 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.
Hubble's law, also known as the Hubble–Lemaître law, is the observation in physical cosmology that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. In other words, the farther a galaxy is from the Earth, the faster it moves away. A galaxy's recessional velocity is typically determined by measuring its redshift, a shift in the frequency of light emitted by the galaxy.
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". Detecting and studying the reionization process is challenging but multiple avenues have been pursued. This reionization was driven by the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
APM 08279+5255 is a very distant, broad absorption line quasar located in the constellation Lynx. It is magnified and split into multiple images by the gravitational lensing effect of a foreground galaxy through which its light passes. It appears to be a giant elliptical galaxy with a supermassive black hole and associated accretion disk. It possesses large regions of hot dust and molecular gas, as well as regions with starburst activity.
A Lyman-alpha emitter (LAE) is a type of distant galaxy that emits Lyman-alpha radiation from neutral hydrogen.
NGC 4603 is a spiral galaxy located about 107 million light years away in the constellation Centaurus. It is a member of the Centaurus Cluster of galaxies, belonging to the section designated "Cen30". The morphological classification is SA(s)c, which indicates it is a pure spiral galaxy with relatively loosely wound arms.
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.
In cosmology, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) are fluctuations in the density of the visible baryonic matter of the universe, caused by acoustic density waves in the primordial plasma of the early universe. In the same way that supernovae provide a "standard candle" for astronomical observations, BAO matter clustering provides a "standard ruler" for length scale in cosmology. The length of this standard ruler is given by the maximum distance the acoustic waves could travel in the primordial plasma before the plasma cooled to the point where it became neutral atoms, which stopped the expansion of the plasma density waves, "freezing" them into place. The length of this standard ruler can be measured by looking at the large scale structure of matter using astronomical surveys. BAO measurements help cosmologists understand more about the nature of dark energy by constraining cosmological parameters.
A Pea galaxy, also referred to as a Pea or Green Pea, might be a type of luminous blue compact galaxy that is undergoing very high rates of star formation. Pea galaxies are so-named because of their small size and greenish appearance in the images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
In astronomy, a Hubble bubble would be "a departure of the local value of the Hubble constant from its globally averaged value," or, more technically, "a local monopole in the peculiar velocity field, perhaps caused by a local void in the mass density."
MACS0647-JD is a galaxy with a redshift of about z = 10.7, equivalent to a light travel distance of 13.26 billion light-years. If the distance estimate is correct, it formed about 427 million years after the Big Bang.
U1.11 is a large quasar group located in the constellations of Leo and Virgo. It is one of the largest LQG's known, with the estimated maximum diameter of 780 Mpc and contains 38 quasars. It was discovered in 2011 during the course of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Until the discovery of the Huge-LQG in November 2012, it was the largest known structure in the universe, beating Clowes–Campusano LQG's 20-year record as largest known structure at the time of its discovery.
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.
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.