Nicholas B. Suntzeff

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Nicholas Suntzeff
Nbs2009 02.jpg
Houston, Texas 2009
Born (1952-11-22) November 22, 1952 (age 71)
San Francisco, CA
NationalityAmerican
CitizenshipUSA
Alma mater Stanford University
University of California at Santa Cruz
Lick Observatory
Known forObservational cosmology based on supernovae
Scientific career
Fields Astronomy
Cosmology
Institutions Texas A&M University,
United States Department of State
Doctoral advisor Robert Kraft

Nicholas B. Suntzeff (born November 22, 1952, San Francisco) is an American astronomer and cosmologist. He is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Observational Astronomy in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he is Director of the Astronomy Program. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astronomical instrumentation. With Brian Schmidt he founded the High-z Supernova Search Team, which was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 to Schmidt and Adam Riess.

Contents

Education

Suntzeff graduated from Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera, California and Redwood High School in Larkspur, California. He received his B.S. with distinction in mathematics from Stanford University in 1974 and his Ph.D. in astronomy & astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory in 1980. While undergraduates at Stanford University, Suntzeff and engineering student Michael Kast built the Stanford Student Observatory. [1] [2]

Work

After graduating in 1980, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate with Professor George Wallerstein in the Department of Astronomy at University of Washington. From 1982 to 1986 he was a Carnegie/Las Campanas Fellow at the Mount Wilson & Las Campanas Observatories, now called the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

After moving to Chile in 1986, Suntzeff working with Mark M. Phillips and Mario Hamuy at CTIO used the newly developed cryogenic CCD cameras to produce the first modern light curve of a Type Ia supernova. [3] The fundamental calibration for distances to Type Ia supernovae was invented by the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey, [4] [5] founded by Mario Hamuy, Jose Maza, Mark M. Phillips, and Suntzeff. The Survey, formed after discussions at the Santa Cruz meeting on supernovae [6] and the encouragement by Allan R. Sandage to use Type Ia supernovae to measure the Hubble constant H0 and the deceleration parameter q0, ran from 1990 to 1995, and provided the pioneering method to measure precision distances to external galaxies, [7] leading to a precise value of the Hubble constant. [8] [9]

Continuing the work of the Calán/Tololo Survey, Suntzeff with Brian P. Schmidt co-founded the High-Z Supernova Search Team in 1994 that used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe. [10] [11] This universal acceleration implies the existence of dark energy consistent with the cosmological constant of Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and was voted the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine. [12]

Prior to 2006, he was the Associate Director of Science at the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and Astronomer at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. In 2007, he was elected Councilor of the American Astronomical Society, and in 2010, he was elected Vice President of the same society. He has been awarded a 2010 Jefferson Senior Science Fellowship [13] of the National Academy of Sciences to work at the US Department of State where he is a Humanitarian Affairs Officer in the Bureau of Human Rights of the Office of International Organization Affairs. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin.

In announcing his award as a 2023 American Astronomical Society Fellow, he was cited "For his transformational leadership in the foundation of supernova cosmology, the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe, and precision measurements of the Hubble–Lemaître flow; for his service to the national and international astronomical communities; for considerable efforts on behalf of human rights, especially the LGBTQ community, both within astronomy and globally; and for establishing the astronomy program at Texas A&M University." [14]

Honors and awards


Ancestry and personal life

He is a native of San Francisco and grew up in Corte Madera, California. He is the paternal grandson of Matvei Andrianovich Evdokimov (1887–1920) (Russian: Матвей Андрианович Евдокимов), one of the principal private arms manufacturers in czarist Russia, located in Izhevsk. [31] The Evdokimov factory in Izhevsk began in the 1860s by Andrian Nikandrovich Evdokimov (1844–1917 (Russian: Андриан Никандрович Евдокимов), and by 1890, was manufacturing Mosin–Nagant and Berdan rifles. [31] [32] They continued production until the Russian Civil War in 1917. These rifles were used during the Revolution and World War I, [33] and were retooled for use during World War II, especially by the Finnish Army.

Although not supporters of the White cause, for their safety the family of Matvei fled east with Admiral Kolchak, the White Army, and the Czech Legion when the Whites captured Perm in 1918. [34] Matvei died at Manchurian Station (Manzhouli) near Chita. His only child, Nicholai Matveevich Evdiokimov (1918–1995) (Russian: Николай Матвеевич Евдокимов) continued with Matvei's wife Zoya Vasilevna Suntzeva (Russian: Зоя Васильевна Сунцевa) (1897–1976), with the Suntzeff family to Harbin China and then to the San Francisco in 1928. Nicholai assumed the last name of his mother and immigrated into the US as Nicholas Matveevich Suntzeff (Russian: Николай Матвеевич Сунцев). The Suntzeff family, prominent merchants from the Ural region, came from Motovilikha (now part of Perm, Russia) and have ancestry in the Udmurt people. A bridge "Сунцев мост" in Motovilikha was named after the family store nearby. [35]

Suntzeff is mentioned in the Alan Alda memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: and Other Things I've Learned. [36]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supernova</span> Explosion of a star at its end of life

A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. A supernova occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star, or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The original object, called the progenitor, either collapses to a neutron star or black hole, or is completely destroyed to form a diffuse nebula. The peak optical luminosity of a supernova can be comparable to that of an entire galaxy before fading over several weeks or months.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SN 1987A</span> 1987 supernova event in the constellation Dorado

SN 1987A was a type II supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth and was the closest observed supernova since Kepler's Supernova in 1604. Light and neutrinos from the explosion reached Earth on February 23, 1987 and was designated "SN 1987A" as the first supernova discovered that year. Its brightness peaked in May of that year, with an apparent magnitude of about 3.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Type Ia supernova</span> Type of supernova in binary systems

A Type Ia supernova is a type of supernova that occurs in binary systems in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. The other star can be anything from a giant star to an even smaller white dwarf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SN 1994D</span> Type Ia supernova

SN 1994D was a Type Ia supernova event in the outskirts of galaxy NGC 4526. It was offset by 9.0″ west and 7.8″ south of the galaxy center and positioned near a prominent dust lane. It was caused by the explosion of a white dwarf star composed of carbon and oxygen. This event was discovered on March 7, 1994 by R. R. Treffers and associates using the automated 30-inch telescope at Leuschner Observatory. It reached peak visual brightness two weeks later on March 22. Modelling of the light curve indicates the explosion would have been visible around March 3-4. A possible detection of helium in the spectrum was made by W. P. S. Meikle and associates in 1996. A mass of 0.014 to 0.03 M☉ in helium would be needed to produce this feature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Kirshner</span> American astronomer

Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.

The Supernova Cosmology Project is one of two research teams that determined the likelihood of an accelerating universe and therefore a positive cosmological constant, using data from the redshift of Type Ia supernovae. The project is headed by Saul Perlmutter at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with members from Australia, Chile, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Filippenko</span> American astrophysicist

Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, as well as on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe.

The High-Z Supernova Search Team was an international cosmology collaboration which used Type Ia supernovae to chart the expansion of the universe. The team was formed in 1994 by Brian P. Schmidt, then a post-doctoral research associate at Harvard University, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff, a staff astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The original team first proposed for the research on September 29, 1994, in a proposal called A Pilot Project to Search for Distant Type Ia Supernova to the CTIO. The original team as co-listed on the first observing proposal was: Nicholas Suntzeff (PI); Brian Schmidt (Co-I); R. Chris Smith, Robert Schommer, Mark M. Phillips, Mario Hamuy, Roberto Aviles, Jose Maza, Adam Riess, Robert Kirshner, Jason Spiromilio, and Bruno Leibundgut. The original project was awarded four nights of telescope time on the CTIO Víctor M. Blanco Telescope on the nights of February 25, 1995, and March 6, 24, and 29, 1995. The pilot project led to the discovery of supernova SN1995Y. In 1995, the HZT elected Brian P. Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo Observatory which is part of the Australian National University to manage the team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Riess</span> American astrophysicist (born 1969)

Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of supernova observation</span> Ancient and modern recorded observations of supernovae explosions

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">NGC 1808</span> Galaxy in the constellation Columba

NGC 1808 is a barred spiral galaxy located in the southern constellation of Columba, about two degrees to the south and east of Gamma Caeli. It was discovered by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop, who described it as a "faint nebula". The galaxy is a member of the NGC 1808 group, which is part of the larger Dorado Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark M. Phillips</span> American astronomer (born 1951)

Mark M. Phillips (born March 31, 1951) is an American astronomer who works on the observational studies of all classes of supernovae. He has worked on SN 1986G, SN 1987A, the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and the Phillips relationship. This relationship has allowed the use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles, leading to the precise measurements of the Hubble constant H0 and the deceleration parameter q0, the latter implying the existence of dark energy or a cosmological constant in the Universe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Astronomy in Chile</span>

In 2011, Chile was home to 42% of the world's astronomical infrastructure, consisting principally of telescopes. In 2015, it was estimated that Chile would contain more than 50% of the global astronomical infrastructure by 2030. In the Atacama desert region of northern Chile, the skies are exceptionally clear and dry for more than 300 days of the year. These conditions have attracted the world's scientific community to develop highly ambitious astronomical projects in the Atacama desert.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mario Hamuy</span> Chilean astronomer

Mario Andrés Hamuy Wackenhut is a Chilean Astronomer and Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chile and Cerro Calan Observatory. He is well known for his observational work on all classes of supernovae, especially the use of Type Ia and Type II supernovae as measures of cosmic distance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Calán/Tololo Survey</span>

The Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey was a supernova survey that ran from 1989 to 1995 at the University of Chile and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory to measure a Hubble diagram out to redshifts of 0.1. It was founded by Mario Hamuy, José Maza Sancho, Mark M. Phillips, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff in 1989 out of discussions at the UC Santa Cruz meeting on supernovae on how to improve the Hubble diagram using Type Ia supernovae. It was also motivated by the suggestion of Allan Sandage to restart a supernova survey after the Sandage and Tammann survey failed due to poor quality photographic plates in 1986. The Survey built on the original supernova survey of Maza done at the f/3 Maksutov Camera at the Cerro Roble Observatory of the University of Chile between 1979 and 1984. The Survey used the CTIO Curtis Schmidt telescope with IIa-O photographic plates, each plate covering a field of 25 sq-deg on the sky. The plates were developed and sent to Santiago Chile the next morning and searched for supernovae at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Chile. Any supernova candidates were then observed the next night using the 0.9m telescope at CTIO with a CCD camera. This was one of the first studies done in astronomy where the telescope time was scheduled to observe objects not yet discovered.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phillips relationship</span>

In astrophysics, the Phillips relationship is the relationship between the peak luminosity of a Type Ia supernova and the speed of luminosity evolution after maximum light. The relationship was independently discovered by the American statistician and astronomer Bert Woodard Rust and the Soviet astronomer Yury Pavlovich Pskovskii in the 1970s. They found that the faster the supernova faded from maximum light, the fainter its peak magnitude was. As a main parameter characterizing the light curve shape, Pskovskii used β, the mean rate of decline in photographic brightness from maximum light to the point at which the luminosity decline rate changes. β is measured in magnitudes per 100-day intervals. Selection of this parameter is justified by the fact that, at that time, the probability of discovering a supernova before the maximum light, and obtain the full light curve, was small. Moreover, the existing light curves were mostly incomplete. On the other hand, to determine the decline after the maximum light was rather simple for most observed supernovae.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente</span> Spanish astronomer (born 1964)

Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente is an astrophysicist working as a professor at the University of Barcelona. Her work has included research on type Ia supernovae. In 2004, she led the team that searched for the companion star to the white dwarf that became supernova SN 1572, observed by Tycho Brahe, among others. Ruiz-Lapuente's research on supernovae contributed to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

John Craig Wheeler is an American astronomer. He is the Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his theoretical work on supernovae. He is a past president of the American Astronomical Society, a Fellow of that society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Maryam Modjaz is a German-American astrophysicist who is a professor and Director of Equity and Inclusion at the New York University. Her research considers the death of massive stars. She was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship in 2018, which she spent at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

References

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  2. ↑ "Domains: Eye on the Sky". alumni.stanford.edu.
  3. ↑ Phillips, M. M.; et al. (July 1987). "The Type Ia Supernova 1986G in NGC 5128 - Optical Photometry and Spectra". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific . 99: 592–605. Bibcode:1987PASP...99..592P. doi:10.1086/132020.
  4. ↑ Phillips, M. M. (August 1993). "The absolute magnitudes of Type IA supernovae". Astrophysical Journal Letters. 413: L105–L108. Bibcode:1993ApJ...413L.105P. doi:10.1086/186970.
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  8. ↑ Suntzeff, N.B.; et al. (March 1999). "Optical Light Curve of the Type IA Supernova 1998BU in M96 and the Supernova Calibration of the Hubble Constant". The Astronomical Journal. 117 (3): 1175–1184. arXiv: astro-ph/9811205 . Bibcode:1999AJ....117.1175S. doi:10.1086/300771. S2CID   119332674.
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  13. 1 2 "Jefferson Science Fellowship". nationalacademies.org. 19 February 2015.
  14. ↑ "AAS Names 22 New Fellows for 2023".
  15. ↑ "ASP: Past Winners of the Trumpler Award". astrosociety.org.
  16. ↑ "Recent Fellows at the Carnegie Observatories". The Carnegie Observatories.
  17. ↑ "AURA Awards". aura-astronomy.org. Archived from the original on 2003-03-29. Retrieved 2008-01-15.
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  19. ↑ "Chairs and Professorships". science.tamu.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-07-21. Retrieved 2015-09-06.
  20. ↑ "| College of Science, Texas A&M University". Archived from the original on 2016-07-21. Retrieved 2015-09-06.
  21. ↑ "Brian Schmidt & the High-z Supernova Search Team". yale.edu.
  22. ↑ "Association of Former Students University-level Distinguished Achievement Awards". tamu.edu. Archived from the original on 2014-12-17.
  23. ↑ "List of Distinguished Professors". tamu.edu. Archived from the original on 2013-12-20.
  24. ↑ "PPO - Bush Excellence Awards for Faculty". tamu.edu. Archived from the original on 2018-10-19. Retrieved 2014-12-17.
  25. ↑ "Breakthrough Prize". breakthroughprize.org.
  26. ↑ "APS Fellow Archive".
  27. ↑ "Regents Recognize Exemplary Faculty and Professionals". 2017-11-03.
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  29. ↑ https://today.tamu.edu/2024/04/18/17-faculty-elected-2023-fellows-of-the-american-association-for-the-advancement-of-science/
  30. ↑ https://www.aaas.org/page/2023-fellows
  31. 1 2 Алексеева, Эрнестина Витальевна (2009). Родословная ижевских фабрикантов охотничьего оружия. XIX-XX вв. Ижевск: КнигоГрад. ISBN   978-5-9631-0053-0.
  32. ↑ "Arms factory of A.N. Evdokimov | Qirme.org". Archived from the original on 2016-03-06. Retrieved 2014-11-01.
  33. ↑ "Удмуртская правда / Сельский обыватель - оружейник, фабрикант - филантроп". udmpravda.ru. Archived from the original on 2014-12-15. Retrieved 2014-11-24.
  34. ↑ "Missouri Women in the Health Sciences - In Her Words - Valentina Suntzeff - Autobiography (Chapter 1)". wustl.edu.
  35. ↑ "Сунцев мост - Мотовилиха - Фотографии старинной Перми - Фотоальбом - Неизвестная Пермь".
  36. ↑ Alda, Alan (2006). Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: and Other Things I've Learned . New York: Random House. ISBN   978-1-4000-6409-0.
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