Jonathan Grindlay
(Harvard University)
Jonathan (Josh) Grindlay is the Robert Treat Paine
Professor of Practical Astronomy at Harvard and
is relieved to have just (July, '03) finished his
second time around as Department Chair. He has had
a long-standing interest in globular clusters as
the factories for producing compact X-ray binaries
-- all the way back to the primodial days of his
discovery of the first X-ray bursts from an accreting
neutron star in NGC 6624 using the non-imaging ANS
X-ray satellite in 1975. With the Einstein X-ray
Observatory he and his student Paul Hertz discovered
the large population of low luminosity X-ray sources
in globulars and suggested they were dominated by
Cataclysmic Variables (accreting white dwarfs),
but with some quiescent neutron star binaries as
well. This has been borne out with NGC 6397 ROSAT
and HST followup studies (with his student Adrienne
Cool) and more recently with the much higher resolution
and more sensitive Chandra studies. From their extensive
Chandra (and HST) studies of 47Tuc and other globulars,
as well as studies by other groups, it is clear
that the Chandra-HST combination is a particularly
effective direct probe of compact binary and compact
object production and dynamics in globular clusters.
When not pursuing the "Practical Astronomy"
of stellar collisions, he is now conducting a Chandra
galactic plane survey and developing hard X-ray
imaging techniques for the ultimate all-sky survey
for black holes.
Adrienne Cool
Principle Scientist
(SFSU)
Adrienne Cool is a native of New York City, and
received her undergraduate degree in physics at
Yale University. She spent a few years after college
working on medical imaging techniques, and then
went to Columbia University where she earned a Master's
degree in electrical engineering. During that time
she happened on some popular astronomy books and
decided that astronomy was for her. Adreinne bought
a pair of binoculars, learned the constellations
from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and went off to a
PhD program in astronomy at Harvard. She came to
the San Francisco Bay Area for a postdoc at Berkeley,
and has now pretty much adjusted to the ocean being
on the wrong side. She is currently an associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy
at San Francisco State University, where she has
enjoyed studying both ordinary and extraordinary
stars in globular clusters with many wonderful students.
Adam Bolton
(MIT)
Adam Bolton is currently a Ph.D. student in the
Center for Space Research and Department of Physics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His
research involves observational extragalactic astronomy
and cosmology. He got his start in astronomy as
an undergraduate at San Francisco State University,
working with Professor Adrienne Cool to identify
binary star systems in the core of NGC 6397 using
these Hubble Space Telescope images. Though composed
of two stars, these systems appear as one star in
HST images due to their distance from Earth, and
can only be distinguished from single stars by their
unique colors and brightnesses.
Charles Bailyn
(Yale University)
Charles Bailyn is a Professor of Astronomy and
Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Yale University.
He was an undergraduate at Yale (where he was a
classmate of Adrienne Cool, the Principal Investigator
of this project) and a graduate student at Harvard
(once again a classmate of Adrienne's). After a
post-doctoral stint at Harvard's Society of Fellows,
he returned to Yale in the guise of a faculty member,
albeit one who knew far more than he ought about
what students were doing outside of the classroom.
His research interests focus on stars in groups,
from ultra-compact binary systems to large clusters
like Omega Centauri. When not doing research, teaching,
or sitting in tiresome committee meetings, he can
occasionally be found singing Renaissance madrigals,
and/or feigning injury to avoid performing too badly
at a variety of athletic endeavors.
Haldan Cohn
(Indiana University)
Haldan Cohn is a professor of astronomy at Indiana
University in Bloomington, where he has been since
1983. He was an undergraduate major in physics at
Harvard, where he met his wife Phyllis Lugger, and
received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton
in 1979. Following his senior year at Harvard, he
worked as a summer student in galactic X-ray astronomy,
under the guidance of Josh Grindlay. He held postdoctoral
positions at Harvard-Smithsonian, Caltech, and the
University of Illinois before joining the Indiana
University faculty. A summer astrophysics workshop
that Haldan Cohn and Phyllis Lugger attended at
the Aspen Institute for Physics in 1983 led to a
long-term collaboration with Josh Grindlay, Charles
Bailyn, and Adrienne Cool on identifying galactic
X-ray binaries, particularly in globular star clusters.
His research interests center on theoretical and
observational studies of globular clusters, with
an emphasis on the core collapse process that leads
to extraordinarily high densities at the centers
of some clusters, such as NGC 6397, producing ideal
conditions for the formation of X-ray binary stars.
Phyllis Lugger
(Indiana University)
Phyllis Lugger is a professor of astronomy at Indiana
University in Bloomington. She received her Ph.D.
in astronomy from Harvard University in 1982, was
a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University,
and an assistant professor at the University of
Missouri in Columbia, before becoming an assistant
professor at IU in 1984. She was promoted to associate
professor in 1988 and to professor in 1995. While
a student at Harvard (undergraduate and graduate),
she met Josh Grindlay, Charles Bailyn, Adrienne
Cool and Haldan Cohn. Her research interests center
on the dynamics of stellar systems (globular star
clusters, interacting binary stars, galactic nuclei
and clusters of galaxies). Phyllis Lugger and Haldan
Cohn test theoretical predictions of cluster evolution
simulations that they run on a GRAPE6 N-body supercomputer
at Indiana University, using the Hubble Space Telescope,
the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the WIYN Telescope.
Peter Edmonds
(CfA)
Peter Edmonds grew up in the town of Albury, in
the Australian countryside. He studied science at
the University of Sydney as an undergraduate, followed
by a Ph.D., also at the University of Sydney, where
he studied pulsating stars using the Anglo-Australian
Telescope. After losing too many battles with clouds
he was keen to change over to space-based observing.
He moved to Baltimore, Maryland for a postdoc at
the Space Telescope Science Insitute, where he developed
an interest in binary stars, globular clusters and
Hubble Space Telescope observations, followed by
a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics (CfA). Currently he is working in the
Education and Public Outreach group at CfA advertising
the wonderful science done with the Chandra X-ray
Observatory. His main research interests continue
to be binaries and globular clusters, with an emphasis
on HST and Chandra observations.
Other Collaborators
Jake Taylor (Harvard University)
|
