Brian Metzger

Brian D. Metzger (* 1980 or 1981 in Burlington (Iowa) ) is an American astrophysicist.

Metzger studied physics from 1999 at the University of Iowa with a bachelor's degree in 2003 and at the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his doctorate in 2009 under Eliot Quataert (Theoretical model of gamma ray burst central engines). As a post-doctoral student , he was a NASA Einstein Fellow and Lyman Spitzer Fellow at Princeton University . In 2013 he became an Assistant Professor and in 2017 an Associate Professor at Columbia University .

He is known for predictions (2010) of the electromagnetic spectrum in the infrared and optical range of transient phenomena (duration from days to around a week) after neutron star fusions, caused by the radioactive decay of the resulting new elements ( r-processes in kilonovae ). This was confirmed in GW170817 on August 17, 2017 (the first case of an observation by both gravitational waves and in the electromagnetic spectrum, multimessenger astronomy).

For 2019 he received the New Horizons in Physics Prize for the prediction of electromagnetic signals from neutron star mergers and his leadership role in the new research area Multi-Messenger Astronomy (laudation) and the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society . From 2014 to 2016 he was a Sloan Research Fellow.

Fonts (selection)

• Kilonovae, Living Reviews in Relativity, Volume 20, No. 3, 2017, Arxiv
• with Rodrigo Fernandez: Electromagnetic Signatures of Neutron Star Mergers in the Advanced LIGO Era, Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, Volume 66, 2016, pp. 23–45

Web links

• Homepage with CV
• Michaele Niehaus: Theory becomes fact for theoretical astrophysicist Brian Metzger , The Hawk Eye, Burlington, November 3, 2018

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Metzger, Quataert, Zinner u. a., Electromagnetic counterparts of compact object mergers powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei, Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Soc., Vol. 406, 2010, pp. 2650-2662.