Sara Ellison | |
---|---|
Title | Professor |
Awards | Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy (2004), American Astronomical Society Rutherford Memorial Medal (2014), Royal Society of Canada Member (2015), Royal Society of Canada's College for New ScholarsContents |
Academic background | |
Education | University of Kent |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Thesis | The Chemical Evolution of QSO Absorbers (2000) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Astronomy |
Sub-discipline | Active galactic nucleus;Galaxy formation and evolution |
Institutions | University of Victoria |
Notable works | Galaxy Pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey I-IV |
Website | http://orca.phys.uvic.ca/~sara/ |
Sara Ellison is an Astronomy Professor at University of Victoria. [1] Her work involves observational extragalactic astronomy,galaxy mergers and evolution,galactic chemistry and active galactic nuclei. [2]
Ellison was inspired to study astronomy by a teacher who was also an astronomer. The only student in a physics class in her small,all-girls school,Ellison finished the standard curriculum quickly and spent the remainder of class time discussing astronomy with her teacher. [3]
Ellison enrolled in Physics and Space Science at the University of Kent in 1993 and received her MSc degree in Physics at this university in 1997. She went on to earn her PhD degree in Astronomy from University of Cambridge in 2000. After finishing her graduate studies,she worked as an ESO fellow in Chile for three years,and then joined the faculty of the University of Victoria as an Assistant Professor in 2003. [4] [5] The same year,she was selected as Canada Research Chair (Tier II),a grant given to extraordinary emerging researchers by the Canadian government. In 2008,she became an Associate Professor and in 2014 a full Professor at the University of Victoria. [4]
The main themes of Ellison's research are studying absorption lines in quasar spectra and studying the effects of environment on galaxy evolution. [2] Her quasar work has focused on studying the chemistry of gas along the line-of-sight to quasars such as Damped Lyman-alpha systems [6] and the Lyman-alpha forest. [7] Much of Ellison's most recent work has focused on using close pairs of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate how galaxy interactions affect galaxy evolution. [8] [9]
In addition to her work in astronomy,Ellison has been involved in science outreach since 1992. [10] She appeared on CBC Radio's Quirks &Quarks to answer questions about lunar landing sites. [11] In a 2015 interview with the Vancouver Sun ,she spoke about how she got interested in astronomy. [3] Her hobbies include painting on stretched canvas in acrylics. [12] An accomplished amateur athlete,Ellison has a Boston Qualifying marathon time and age group wins in both running and triathlon. [13]
An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum,with characteristics indicating that the luminosity is not produced by stars. Such excess,non-stellar emissions have been observed in the radio,microwave,infrared,optical,ultra-violet,X-ray and gamma ray wavebands. A galaxy hosting an AGN is called an active galaxy. The non-stellar radiation from an AGN is theorized to result from the accretion of matter by a supermassive black hole at the center of its host galaxy.
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".
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico,United States. The project began in 2000 and was named after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,which contributed significant funding.
The Sloan Great Wall (SGW) is a cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies. Its discovery was announced from Princeton University on October 20,2003,by J. Richard Gott III,Mario Jurić,and their colleagues,based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
MS 1512-cB58 is a galaxy in the Boötes constellation. It is a starburst galaxy that is being strongly gravitationally lensed,magnifying its apparent size by 30−50 times.
In cosmology,galaxy filaments are the largest known structures in the universe,consisting of 'walls' of gravitationally bound galactic superclusters. These massive,thread-like formations can reach 80 megaparsecs h−1 and form the boundaries between voids. Galaxy filaments form the cosmic web and define the overall structure of the observable universe.
A large quasar group (LQG) is a collection of quasars that form what are thought to constitute the largest astronomical structures in the observable universe. LQGs are thought to be precursors to the sheets,walls and filaments of galaxies found in the relatively nearby universe.
Green bean galaxies (GBGs) are very rare astronomical objects that are thought to be quasar ionization echos. They were discovered by Mischa Schirmer and colleagues R. Diaz,K. Holhjem,N.A. Levenson,and C. Winge. The authors report the discovery of a sample of Seyfert-2 galaxies with ultra-luminous galaxy-wide narrow-line regions (NLRs) at redshifts z=0.2-0.6.
Alice Eve Shapley is a professor at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She was one of the discoverers of the spiral galaxy BX442. Through her time at University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA) she has taught Nature of the Universe,Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes,Cosmology:Our Changing Concepts of the Universe,Galaxies,Scientific Writing,AGNs,Galaxies,*and* Writing,and The Formation and Evolution of Galaxies and the IGM. Shapley has committed herself too over a two decades of research and publication in the interest of physics and astronomy.
Stephanie A. Snedden is an American astronomer at the Apache Point Observatory of the New Mexico State University in New Mexico,United States. The minor planet 133008 Snedden is named after her;it was discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Apache Point Observatory on 5 October 2002. She has published papers including The Case for Optically Thick High-Velocity Broad-Line Region Gas in Active Galactic Nuclei.
Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
Emily Levesque is an American astronomer and assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. She is renowned for her work on massive stars and using these stars to investigate galaxy formation. In 2014,she received the Annie Jump Cannon Award for her innovative work on gamma ray bursts and the Sloan Fellowship in 2017. In 2015,Levesque,Rachel Bezanson,and Grant R. Tremblay published an influential paper,which critiqued the use of the Physics GRE as an admissions cutoff criterion for astronomy postgraduate programs by showing there was no statistical correlation between applicant's score and later success in their academic careers. Subsequently,the American Astronomical Society adopted the stance that the Physics GRE should not be mandatory for graduate school applications,and many graduate astronomy programs have since removed the Physics GRE as a required part of their graduate school applications. She is also the author of the 2020 popular science book The Last Stargazers:The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers.
Georges Meylan is a Swiss astronomer,born on July 31,1950,in Lausanne,Switzerland. He was the director of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne,Switzerland,and now a professor emeritus of astrophysics and cosmology at EPFL. He is still active in both research and teaching.
Kim A. Venn is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria,Canada,and director of the university's Astronomy Research Centre. She researches the chemo-dynamical analysis of stars in the galaxy and its nearby dwarf satellites.
Blakesley Burkhart is an astrophysicist. She is the winner of the 2017 Robert J. Trumpler Award awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,which recognizes a Ph.D. thesis that is "particularly significant to astronomy." She also is the winner of the 2019 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy and the 2022 winner of The American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award. The awards both cited her work on magnetohydrodynamic turbulence,and for developing innovative techniques for comparing observable astronomical phenomena with theoretical models.
Barbara Sue Ryden is an American astrophysicist who is a Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University. Her research considers the formation,shape and structure of galaxies. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016.