Anton census

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Anton census in 2019

Johann Anton Zensus (born February 1, 1958 in Bremerhaven ) is a German radio astronomer .

Career

Zensus studied physics and astronomy in Cologne, Münster and Bonn (at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy ) and received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of Münster. As a post-doctoral student , he was at Caltech from 1985 to 1988 and was then a research assistant at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, from 1996 with a permanent position (tenure). In 1997 he became a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. He has also been an adjunct scientist at the NRAO since 2001 and an honorary professor at the University of Cologne from 2005 .

He was involved in the observation of the supermassive black holes in M87 with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) (from 2017 as chairman of its council). Its results at M 87 were published in April 2019 and represented the first direct image of a black hole. With another worldwide interconnection of radio telescopes, the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA) including ALMA , he was at a radio astronomical observation of the supermassive black hole involved in the center of the Milky Way ( Sagittarius A * ) with a resolution not yet achieved. The observation took place at a wavelength of 3.5 mm and enables the prediction that the interference due to scattering in the EHT image of Sagittarius A * (recorded at 1.3 mm wavelength) that is currently being processed is probably small. The source in the center has a major axis of 120 micro-arcseconds and is symmetrical, almost round in shape.

As part of RadioAstron , he was also involved in recording the region of origin of the jet around the supermassive black hole in NGC 1275 , which showed that the origin of the jet is likely to be in a wider region than previously favored (namely the accretion disk instead of the ergosphere ).

In 1999 he was awarded the Max Planck Research Award for radio interferometry large base lengths ( Very Long Baseline Interferometry , VLBI).

He is the spokesman for the European RadioNet consortium, funded with 10 million euros from 2017, in which institutions from 13 European countries participate.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RadioNet Coordinator Anton Zensus elected Board Chair of the Event Horizon Telescope , RadioNet, September 25, 2017
  2. ↑ S. Issaoun, Zensus, H. Falcke, T. Krichbaum et al., The Size, Shape, and Scattering of Sagittarius A * at 86 GHz: First VLBI with ALMA , Astroph. J. 2019
  3. ↑ Deep inside Perseus A , Innovation Report, April 3, 2018
  4. ↑ G. Giovannini, Anton Zensus a. a., A wide and collimated radio jet in 3C84 on the scale of a few hundred gravitational radii, Nature Astronomy, Volume 2, 2018, pp. 472–477, Arxiv
personal data
SURNAME Census, Anton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Census, Johann Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German radio astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremerhaven