Simon White

Last updated

Simon David Manton White
Simon White at RAS NAM 2012.jpg
Simon White speaking at the 2012 National Astronomy Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society
Born (1951-09-30) 30 September 1951 (age 72)
Ashford, Kent, England
Alma mater Jesus College, Cambridge
University of Toronto
Known forCosmological structure formation
Spouse Guinevere Kauffmann
Awards Helen B. Warner Prize (1986)
Heineman Prize (2005)
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2006)
Brouwer Award (2008)
Max Born Prize (2010)
Shaw Prize (2017)
Scientific career
Fields Astrophysics and cosmology
Institutions University of California, Berkeley
University of Arizona
University of Cambridge
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
Thesis The Clustering of Galaxies [1]  (1977)
Doctoral advisor Donald Lynden-Bell

Simon David Manton White (born 30 September 1951), FRS, is a British astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019. [2]

Contents

Life

White studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge in the University of Cambridge (B.A. 1972) and Astronomy at the University of Toronto (MSc 1974). In 1977 he obtained a doctorate in Astronomy under Donald Lynden-Bell entitled "The Clustering of Galaxies" at the University of Cambridge. After a few years at the University of California, Berkeley, the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona and the University of Cambridge he was appointed in 1994 as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and as director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. White has also been research professor at the University of Arizona (1992), guest professor at the University of Durham (1995), honorary professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (1994) and at the Astronomical Observatories of Shanghai (SHAO) (1999) and Beijing (BAO) (2001). White lives in Munich with his wife, the astrophysicist Guinevere Kauffmann. They have one son. [3]

Work

White has worked primarily on the formation of structure in the Universe. He is known for his contributions to our understanding of galaxy formation and for his role in helping to establish the viability of the current standard model for the evolution of cosmic structure, the so-called ΛCDM model.

Already at the time of his doctoral work he studied the influence of Dark Matter on the growth of structure and in 1978 he and Martin Rees argued that the properties of galaxies can be understood if they form by condensation of gas at the centres of extended and hierarchically clustering dark matter halos. [4] This has been the basic paradigm for galaxy formation ever since.

In later years White developed computer models which allowed the growth of galaxies and galaxy clustering to be simulated directly in order to allow quantitative comparison of theoretical models with astronomical observations. His 1983 work with Marc Davis and Carlos Frenk demonstrated that the dark matter could not be made of massive neutrinos, at the time the only known elementary particles which were considered possible candidates. [5] Their subsequent work together with George Efstathiou was particularly influential in establishing that a universe dominated by Cold Dark Matter (a new kind of elementary particle of unknown type) could produce large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution which does closely resemble that observed. [6] A more recent large project was the Millennium Simulation, carried out in Garching in 2005 as part of the work of a large international collaboration, the Virgo Consortium. At the time, this was the largest N-body simulation ever carried out, with 10 billion N-body particles representing the dark matter distribution, and using simplified physical recipes to follow the formation and evolution of more than 20,000,000 galaxies throughout a cubic region more than 2 billion light-years on a side. [7]

Work by White has addressed issues of stellar dynamics, of the detailed structure of galaxies and their dark halos, of the processes controlling galaxy formation, of the structure and evolution of galaxy clusters, and of the statistics of galaxy clustering. Papers include those with Julio Navarro and Carlos Frenk on the "universal" structure of dark matter halos. [8] The Navarro–Frenk–White profile is named after them, and the 1996 and 1997 papers in which they systematically used cosmological N-body simulations to explore its properties are currently White's highest impact theoretical work (with more than 21,000 citations according to Google Scholar). This is because these two papers demonstrated that the characteristic size and density of dark matter halos are tightly related to their mass in a way which depends on, and so can be used to measure, important properties of our universe as a whole, for example, its material content and its spatial curvature, as well as the properties of the initial conditions from which all cosmic structure has grown.

White's more than 500 publications in the refereed professional literature have been cited more than 258,000 times by other scientists (status end-2023 according to Google Scholar).

Awards and honours

Related Research Articles

The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies. Galaxy formation is hypothesized to occur from structure formation theories, as a result of tiny quantum fluctuations in the aftermath of the Big Bang. The simplest model in general agreement with observed phenomena is the Lambda-CDM model—that is, that clustering and merging allows galaxies to accumulate mass, determining both their shape and structure. Hydrodynamics simulation, which simulates both baryons and dark matter, is widely used to study galaxy formation and evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rashid Sunyaev</span> Russian astronomer (born 1943)

Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his MS degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1966. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 2010.

A galactic halo is an extended, roughly spherical component of a galaxy which extends beyond the main, visible component. Several distinct components of a galaxy comprise its halo:

The Lambda-CDM, Lambda cold dark matter or ΛCDM model is a mathematical model of the Big Bang theory with three major components:

  1. a cosmological constant denoted by lambda (Λ) associated with dark energy,
  2. the postulated cold dark matter, and
  3. ordinary matter.
<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dark matter halo</span> Theoretical cosmological structure

In modern models of physical cosmology, a dark matter halo is a basic unit of cosmological structure. It is a hypothetical region that has decoupled from cosmic expansion and contains gravitationally bound matter. A single dark matter halo may contain multiple virialized clumps of dark matter bound together by gravity, known as subhalos. Modern cosmological models, such as ΛCDM, propose that dark matter halos and subhalos may contain galaxies. The dark matter halo of a galaxy envelops the galactic disc and extends well beyond the edge of the visible galaxy. Thought to consist of dark matter, halos have not been observed directly. Their existence is inferred through observations of their effects on the motions of stars and gas in galaxies and gravitational lensing. Dark matter halos play a key role in current models of galaxy formation and evolution. Theories that attempt to explain the nature of dark matter halos with varying degrees of success include cold dark matter (CDM), warm dark matter, and massive compact halo objects (MACHOs).

The Millennium Run, or Millennium Simulation is a computer N-body simulation used to investigate how the distribution of matter in the Universe has evolved over time, in particular, how the observed population of galaxies was formed. It is used by scientists working in physical cosmology to compare observations with theoretical predictions.

Marc Davis is an American professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973 and has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences (1991) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992). He taught for a year at Princeton, 1973–74, then was on the astronomy faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1981. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carlos Frenk</span> Mexican-British cosmologist

Carlos Silvestre Frenk is a Mexican-British cosmologist. Frenk graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Cambridge, and spent his early research career in the United States, before settling permanently in the United Kingdom. He joined the Durham University Department of Physics in 1986 and since 2001 has served as the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galaxy merger</span> Merger whereby at least two galaxies collide

Galaxy mergers can occur when two galaxies collide. They are the most violent type of galaxy interaction. The gravitational interactions between galaxies and the friction between the gas and dust have major effects on the galaxies involved. The exact effects of such mergers depend on a wide variety of parameters such as collision angles, speeds, and relative size/composition, and are currently an extremely active area of research. Galaxy mergers are important because the merger rate is a fundamental measurement of galaxy evolution. The merger rate also provides astronomers with clues about how galaxies bulked up over time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GADGET</span> Computer software for cosmological simulations

GADGET is free software for cosmological N-body/SPH simulations written by Volker Springel at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. The name is an acronym of "GAlaxies with Dark matter and Gas intEracT". It is released under the GNU GPL. It can be used to study for example galaxy formation and dark matter.

The Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) profile is a spatial mass distribution of dark matter fitted to dark matter halos identified in N-body simulations by Julio Navarro, Carlos Frenk and Simon White. The NFW profile is one of the most commonly used model profiles for dark matter halos.

The Gruber Prize in Cosmology, established in 2000, is one of three prestigious international awards worth US$500,000 awarded by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julio Navarro (astrophysicist)</span>

Julio F. Navarro FRSC is a professor of Astronomy at the department of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Victoria. Dr. Navarro's research is mainly focused on the formation and evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters and the structure and evolution of their dark matter component. He is famous for his theoretical studies of dark matter halos carried out using massive N-body simulations. Julio F. Navarro along with Carlos Frenk and Simon White has formulated a density profile for dark matter halos, which was named after them. In 2015, he won the Henry Marshall Tory Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. He is chief editor of the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

Guinevere Alice Mei-Ing Kauffmann was born in California. She is an astrophysicist and is known for her work studying galaxies among other subjects.

The Virgo Consortium was founded in 1994 for Cosmological Supercomputer Simulations in response to the UK's High Performance Computing Initiative. Virgo developed rapidly into an international collaboration between a dozen scientists in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, United States and Japan.

George Petros Efstathiou is a British astrophysicist who is Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at the University of Cambridge and was the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge from 2008 to 2016. He was previously Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute for Computational Cosmology</span>

The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) is a Research Institute at Durham University, England. It was founded in November 2002 as part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, which also includes the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP). The ICC's primary mission is to advance fundamental knowledge in cosmology. Topics of active research include: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the evolution of cosmic structure, the formation of galaxies, and the determination of fundamental parameters.

The Illustris project is an ongoing series of astrophysical simulations run by an international collaboration of scientists. The aim was to study the processes of galaxy formation and evolution in the universe with a comprehensive physical model. Early results were described in a number of publications following widespread press coverage. The project publicly released all data produced by the simulations in April, 2015. Key developers of the Illustris simulation have been Volker Springel and Mark Vogelsberger. The Illustris simulation framework and galaxy formation model has been used for a wide range of spin-off projects, starting with Auriga and IllustrisTNG followed by Thesan (2021), MillenniumTNG (2022) and TNG-Cluster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galaxy group</span> Aggregation of galaxies with 50 or fewer members

A galaxy group or group of galaxies (GrG) is an aggregation of galaxies comprising about 50 or fewer gravitationally bound members, each at least as luminous as the Milky Way (about 1010 times the luminosity of the Sun); collections of galaxies larger than groups that are first-order clustering are called galaxy clusters. The groups and clusters of galaxies can themselves be clustered, into superclusters of galaxies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Duffy (astronomer)</span> Astronomer and science communicator (born 1983)

Alan R. Duffy is a British and Australian professional astronomer and science communicator. He was born in England, raised in Northern Ireland, and is currently based in Australia. He is a professor at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, and is the Lead Scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia.

References

  1. Simon White at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. He is now one of emeritus scientific members along with other former directors Wolfgang Hillebrandt and Rashid Sunyaev. There was a special symposium on 29 November 2019 at MPA to celebrate his retirement.
  3. "Simon D. M. White". mpa-garching.mpg.de. Retrieved 10 September 2012.
  4. White, Simon; Rees, Martin (May 1978). "Core condensation in heavy halos - A two-stage theory for galaxy formation and clustering". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 183 (3): 341–358. Bibcode:1978MNRAS.183..341W. doi: 10.1093/mnras/183.3.341 .
  5. White, Simon; Frenk, Carlos; Davis, Marc (November 1983). "Clustering in a neutrino-dominated universe". The Astrophysical Journal. 274: L1–L5. Bibcode:1985ApJ...292..371D. doi:10.1086/184139.
  6. Davis, Marc; Efstathiou, George; Frenk, Carlos; White, Simon (May 1985). "The evolution of large-scale structure in a universe dominated by cold dark matter". The Astrophysical Journal. 292: 371–394. Bibcode:1983ApJ...274L...1W. doi:10.1086/163168.
  7. Springel, Volker; et al. (June 2005). "Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars". Nature. 435 (7042): 629–636. arXiv: astro-ph/0504097 . Bibcode:2005Natur.435..629S. doi:10.1038/nature03597. PMID   15931216. S2CID   4383030.
  8. Navarro, Julio; Frenk, Carlos; White, Simon (December 1997). "A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering". The Astrophysical Journal. 490 (2): 493–508. arXiv: astro-ph/9611107 . Bibcode:1997ApJ...490..493N. doi:10.1086/304888. S2CID   3067250.
  9. "'Gang of Four' Receives $500,000 Gruber Cosmology Prize for Reconstructing How the Universe Grew" (Press release). Gruber Foundation. 1 June 2011. Archived from the original on 8 June 2011.
  10. "关于公布2015年中国科学院院士增选当选院士名单的公告" [Announcement on the publication of the list of academicians elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015] (in Chinese). Chinese Academy of Sciences. 7 December 2015.
  11. "Announcement of The Shaw Laureates 2017" (Press release). The Shaw Prize. 23 May 2017.
  12. "Clarivate Reveals 2020 Citation Laureates - Annual List of Researchers of Nobel Class". PR Newswire. 23 September 2020.