February

Kaisey Mandel is a finalist for this year's Savage Award for the best doctoral dissertation by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis

February 15, 2012

Kaisey Mandel (Harvard Ph.D. Astronomy 2011), who is currently a postdoc in the Astrostatistics group at Imperial College London has been notified that he is a finalist for this year's Savage Award for the best doctoral dissertation by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.  They are inviting him to their meeting in Tokyo to give a talk and attend the award ceremonies.

http://bayesian.org/awards/Savage.html

Kaisey notes two of the Honorable Mentions for this award in previous ...

Read more about Kaisey Mandel is a finalist for this year's Savage Award for the best doctoral dissertation by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis

Twelve students and postdocs from the Astronomy department were awarded Einstein/Hubble/Sagan fellowships in 2012

February 14, 2012

Twelve students and postdocs from the Astronomy department were awarded
Einstein/Hubble/Sagan fellowships in 2012: Laura Blecha, Smadar Naoz, Joey
Neilsen and Meng Su were awarded an Einstein fellowship; Kaitlin
Kratter, Matt McQuinn (former student), Stella Offner, Yue Shen, Jack
Steiner, and Mark Vogelsberger were awarded a Hubble fellowship;
and Sarah Ballard and Jean-Michel Desert were awarded the Sagan
fellowship. 
... Read more about Twelve students and postdocs from the Astronomy department were awarded Einstein/Hubble/Sagan fellowships in 2012

Astronomy department senior lecturer, Phil Sadler, won the Robert A. Millikan Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)

February 14, 2012

Synopsis: Tidal Disruption of a Star (N. Stone and A. Loeb)

February 9, 2012

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Swift

The cores of most galaxies are thought to harbor black holes with masses of a million or more suns. But many remain unseen until an unlucky star passes too close and is pulled apart by tidal forces. The stellar debris gathers into a disk and spirals towards the black hole in the center. As it does, it may form a jet of material that beams high-energy light like a flashlight. Last spring, the Swift satellite measured a flare of x rays and gamma rays from a distant galaxy that has the hallmarks of such a jet that happens to point right at us.... Read more about Synopsis: Tidal Disruption of a Star (N. Stone and A. Loeb)

Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy to Heather A. Knutson, Astronomy PhD '09

February 8, 2012

The Annie Jump Cannon Award for outstanding research and promise for future research by a woman goes to Heather Knutson (Caltech) "for her pioneering work on the characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres." Knutson's groundbreaking observations of wavelength-dependent thermal emission of exoplanets over large fractions of their orbit have revealed details of atmospheric dynamics, energy transport, inversion layers, and chemical composition. Her work has expanded the rich field of planetary characterization by providing new windows into the atmospheres of planets beyond the confines of our solar system.

... Read more about Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy to Heather A. Knutson, Astronomy PhD '09

The Art of Science Exhibit - Feb 11 - April 7, Kimball Art Center

February 6, 2012

Many of you watched the spiral arm movie on the ITC display near the elevator. This beautiful movie, produced by the ITC members: Elena D'Onghia, Mark Vogelsberger, and Lars Hernquist, has been selected to be exhibited between 2/11-4/7, 2012 at the Kimball Art Center, in Park City, Utah, http://www.kimballartcenter.org/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions
... Read more about The Art of Science Exhibit - Feb 11 - April 7, Kimball Art Center