Rebecca Oppenheimer

Last updated
Rebecca Oppenheimer
Born1972 (age 51–52)
New York, New York
Alma mater
Known for Astrophysics
Cosmology
Activism
Scientific career
Fields Astrophysics, chemistry, materials science
Institutions American Museum of Natural History
Columbia University
Thesis Brown Dwarf Companions of Nearby Stars  (1999)
Doctoral advisor S. R. Kulkarni
Gibor Basri (postdoc)

Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of four curator/professors in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist. She investigates planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Her optics laboratory is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle the problem of directly seeing and taking spectra of nearby solar systems with exoplanets and studying their composition, with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system. [1] [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Oppenheimer attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After graduating in 1990, she attended Columbia University, where she was an I. I. Rabi Science Scholar. She received a B.A. in Physics from Columbia in 1994. [3] In 1999 she was granted a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology and spent the following two years at the University of California at Berkeley on a Hubble Space Telescope Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. In 2001, she moved back to New York City to research at the AMNH, where she joined the faculty in 2004. Oppenheimer regularly gives public and professional lectures on astronomical research.

Career

Oppenheimer holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University's Department of Astronomy and has published over two hundred and sixty research and public-oriented science articles, with an h-index over 55 and more than 10,000 citations. [4] She holds three patents, is the co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, [5] [6] and is active in research on exoplanets. She has led or co-led many novel instrumentation projects, including the Lyot Project, [7] Project 1640, [8] the Gemini Planet Imager, [9] Palomar Adaptive Optics, [10] and the Palomar Advanced Radial Velocity Instrument. [11]

Oppenheimer also works on ultracool white dwarfs, [12] the end states of 99% of stars, including the Sun, their role in comprising the baryonic dark matter, [13] as well as coronagraphy, the art of seeing faint celestial objects next to bright ones. [14] Oppenheimer has served on numerous NASA advisory committees including the TPF Science and Technology Definition Team, [15] The NASA Astrophysics Senior review for 2014, 2016 (Chair), and 2019, [16] as well as various NSF and NRC committees. Oppenheimer has been a member of NASA's Exoplanet Technology Assessment Committee since 2015. [17]

She is an active member of the American Astronomical Society and the International Astronomical Union. She is a member of the A, B, C, D, F, and G affiliations within the IAU. [18]

Oppenheimer's education-related efforts at the AMNH include curating the AstroBulletin series of news items and bi-annual documentaries. She is also Curator-in-Charge of the Digital Universe Atlas. She co-curated the space show Journey to the Stars and curated the exhibit Searching for New Worlds . Her video, "The Known Universe," [19] created as part of an exhibit with the Rubin Museum, is an early example of a science video going viral on YouTube in 2009.

According to Google Scholar, Oppenheimer's peer-reviewed articles as of 2021 have been cited 10,878 times. Her h-index is 55 and i10-index is 133. [20]

Awards and honors

Personal life

Oppenheimer grew up in the Upper West Side in Manhattan, NY. [26] Oppenheimer is a trans woman and an activist for the rights of LGBT people. [27] She came out in 2014 [26] and was featured in a New York Times piece where she wrote about being transgender and a scientist. [28]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brown dwarf</span> Type of substellar object larger than a planet

Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that have more mass than the biggest gas giant planets, but less than the least massive main-sequence stars. Their mass is approximately 3 to 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ)—not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen (1H) into helium in their cores, but massive enough to emit some light and heat from the fusion of deuterium (2H). The most massive ones can fuse lithium (7Li).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Space Telescope Science Institute</span> Science operations center operated by NASA

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), science operations and mission operations center for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI was established in 1981 as a community-based science center that is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). STScI's offices are located on the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus and in the Rotunda building in Baltimore, Maryland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gliese 229</span> Star in the constellation Lepus

Gliese 229 is a multiple system composed of a red dwarf and two brown dwarfs, located 18.8 light years away in the constellation Lepus. The primary component has 58% of the mass of the Sun, 55% of the Sun's radius, and a very low projected rotation velocity of 1 km/s at the stellar equator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2M1207b</span> Planetary-mass object orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207

2M1207b is a planetary-mass object orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207, in the constellation Centaurus, approximately 170 light-years from Earth. It is one of the first candidate exoplanets to be directly observed. It was discovered in April 2004 by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile by a team from the European Southern Observatory led by Gaël Chauvin. It is believed to be from 5 to 6 times the mass of Jupiter and may orbit 2M1207 at a distance roughly as far from the brown dwarf as Pluto is from the Sun.

Doris Daou is a Lebanese-born Canadian-American astronomer who was formerly the Director for Education and Public Outreach of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and the associate director of the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI), and is currently the program contact for NASA's "Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx)".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HR 8799</span> Star in the constellation Pegasus

HR 8799 is a roughly 30 million-year-old main-sequence star located 133.3 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus. It has roughly 1.5 times the Sun's mass and 4.9 times its luminosity. It is part of a system that also contains a debris disk and at least four massive planets. These planets were the first exoplanets whose orbital motion was confirmed by direct imaging. The star is a Gamma Doradus variable: its luminosity changes because of non-radial pulsations of its surface. The star is also classified as a Lambda Boötis star, which means its surface layers are depleted in iron peak elements. It is the only known star which is simultaneously a Gamma Doradus variable, a Lambda Boötis type, and a Vega-like star.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NASA Exoplanet Science Institute</span>

The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) is part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and is on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA. NExScI was formerly known as the Michelson Science Center and before that as the Interferometry Science Center. It was renamed NExScI in the Fall of 2008 to reflect NASA's growing interest in the search for planets outside of the Solar System, also known as exoplanets. The executive director of NExScI is Charles A. Beichman.

Project 1640 is a high contrast imaging project at Palomar Observatory. It seeks to image brown dwarfs and Jupiter-sized planets around nearby stars. Rebecca Oppenheimer, associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, is the principal investigator for the project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smadar Naoz</span> Israeli-American astrophysicist

Smadar Naoz is an Israeli-American astrophysicist, and was the 2015 winner of the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy for her scientific contributions to the fields of cosmology and planetary dynamics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mercedes López-Morales</span> Spanish-American astrophysicist

Mercedes López-Morales is a Spanish-American astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, who works on detection and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Digby</span> New Zealand astronomer and ecologist

Andrew Digby is an astronomer and ecologist whose work focusses on researching and conserving New Zealand's endangered endemic birds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TRAPPIST-1f</span> Earth-size exoplanet orbiting TRAPPIST-1

TRAPPIST-1f, also designated as 2MASS J23062928-0502285 f, is an exoplanet, likely rocky, orbiting within the habitable zone around the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, located 40.7 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius. The exoplanet was found by using the transit method, in which the dimming effect that a planet causes as it crosses in front of its star is measured.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TRAPPIST-1e</span> Earth-size exoplanet orbiting TRAPPIST-1

TRAPPIST-1e, also designated as 2MASS J23062928-0502285 e, is a rocky, close-to-Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone around the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, located 40.7 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius. Astronomers used the transit method to find the exoplanet, a method that measures the dimming of a star when a planet crosses in front of it.

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) is the internationally recognized body charged with fostering agreement on nomenclature and classification across geoscientific disciplines. However, they have yet to create a formal definition of the term "planet". As a result, there are various geophysical definitions in use among professional geophysicists, planetary scientists, and other professionals in the geosciences. Many professionals opt to use one of several of these geophysical definitions instead of the definition voted on by the International Astronomical Union, the dominant organization for setting planetary nomenclature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kevin France</span>

Kevin France is an astrophysicist and assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado. His research focuses on exoplanets and their host stars, protoplanetary disks, and the development of instrumentation for space-borne astronomy missions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BD+60 1417b</span> Exoplanet

BD+60 1417b is a confirmed exoplanet discovered in the year 2021 using the imaging method. BD+60 1417b is the only known exoplanet in the system BD+60 1417, around 45 parsecs from Earth. BD+60 1417 is a young K0 star, while BD+60 1417 b has a late-L spectral type. The planet might be the first discovery of a directly imaged exoplanet found by a citizen scientist. Discovery of exoplanets involving amateurs are usually transiting exoplanets and are rarely discovered with other methods. Another example of a non-transiting exoplanet discovery by an amateur is the microlensing exoplanet Kojima-1Lb.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luigi Rolly Bedin</span> Italian researcher

Luigi Rolly Bedin, is an Italian astrophysicist and researcher at the National Institute of Astrophysics of the Padua Astronomical Observatory. His research focuses on stellar populations in open and globular clusters, exoplanets and nearby brown dwarfs. He is the discoverer with his team of the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Bedin I. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union.

References

  1. ↑ "Rebecca Oppenheimer". the Guardian. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  2. ↑ "Profile: Rebecca Oppenheimer | Astrophysics". research.amnh.org. Retrieved 2020-01-29.
  3. ↑ Hutson, Matthew (Winter 2020). "Star Search". Columbia College Today. Retrieved March 25, 2021.
  4. ↑ "Oppenheimer CV" (PDF).
  5. ↑ Nakajima, T.; et al. (1995-11-20). "Discovery of a cool brown dwarf". Nature. 378 (6556). Nature Publishing Group: 463–465. Bibcode:1995Natur.378..463N. doi:10.1038/378463a0. S2CID   4351772.
  6. ↑ Oppenheimer, B. R.; et al. (1995-12-01). "Infrared Spectrum of the Cool Brown Dwarf Gl 229B". Science. 270 (5241). Science Magazine: 1478–1479. Bibcode:1995Sci...270.1478O. doi:10.1126/science.270.5241.1478. PMID   7491492. S2CID   45078715.
  7. ↑ "The Lyot Project Website". January 2004.
  8. ↑ "Project 1640". March 2013.
  9. ↑ "Gemini Planet Imager". March 2018.
  10. ↑ "PalomarAO".
  11. ↑ Gibson, Rose K.; Oppenheimer, Rebecca; Matthews, Christopher T.; Vasisht, Gautam (November 2019). "PARVI". Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems. 6 (1): 011002. arXiv: 1911.04567 . doi: 10.1117/1.JATIS.6.1.011002 . S2CID   207863665.
  12. ↑ Oppenheimer, B. R.; Saumon, D.; Hodgkin, S. T.; Jameson, R. F.; Hambly, N. C.; Chabrier, G.; Filippenko, A. V.; Coil, A. L.; Brown, M. E. (20 March 2001). "Ultracool White Dwarfs". The Astrophysical Journal. 550 (1): 448. arXiv: astro-ph/0101258 . doi: 10.1086/319718 . S2CID   38820978.
  13. ↑ Oppenheimer, B. R.; Hambly, N. C.; Digby, A. P.; Hodgkin, S. T.; Saumon, D. (2001). "Direct Detection of Galactic Halo Dark Matter". Science. 292 (5517): 698–702. arXiv: astro-ph/0104293 . Bibcode:2001Sci...292..698O. doi:10.1126/science.1059954. PMID   11264524. S2CID   18882777.
  14. ↑ Overbye, Dennis (2004-06-22). "Grasping for Light of Distant Worlds". New York Times.
  15. ↑ "Terrestrial Planet Finder Science and Technology Definition Team". March 2005. Archived from the original on 2004-04-09.
  16. ↑ "NASA Astrophysics Senior Reviews".
  17. ↑ "NASA ExoTAC".
  18. ↑ "International Astronomical Union | IAU". www.iau.org. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  19. ↑ "The Known Universe". YouTube . 15 December 2009. Archived from the original on 2021-12-13.
  20. ↑ "Rebecca Oppenheimer". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-01-02.
  21. ↑ "The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists | The New York Academy of Sciences". nyas. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  22. ↑ "Listing of all Hubble Fellows 1990-2017". www.stsci.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-02-20. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  23. ↑ "Hubble Fellowships". www.stsci.edu. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  24. ↑ "Home - NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP)". www.nsfgrfp.org. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  25. ↑ "I.I. Rabi Scholars Program | Columbia College". www.college.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-12-22. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  26. 1 2 "Star Search". Columbia College Today. 2021-01-18. Retrieved 2021-10-08.
  27. ↑ Schmelz, Joan (2015-04-27). "Women In Astronomy: The Limits of Labels, Categories, and Classifications". Women In Astronomy. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  28. ↑ "Opinion | Transgender Lives: Your Stories: Rebecca Oppenheimer". The New York Times. 2018-09-13. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-01-30.
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