Chryssa Kouveliotou

Chryssa Kouveliotou (* 1953 ; Greek Χρύσα Κουβελιώτου ) is a Greek-American astrophysicist. She is a scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center of NASA .

Chryssa Kouveliotou

Life

Kouveliotou grew up in Greece and studied at the University of Athens (up to the intermediate diploma) and the University of Sussex and received his doctorate in 1981 from the Technical University of Munich with a dissertation on Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB). She then taught physics and astronomy at the University of Athens. Then she went to NASA, where she was part of the team that found recurring gamma bursts ( gamma repeater ). In 1985 she went to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville at the invitation of Gerald Fishman . She was involved in the research of gamma bursts with the BATSE experiment , started in 1991 , and in BeppoSAX (started in 1997), with which equivalents of gamma bursts in the X-ray range were found in 1997. She was involved in this as well as in the discovery of the coincidences of GRB and supernovae (first found in 1998, particularly clearly in 2003 in one of the brightest and closest GRBs observed up to that point). The discovery supported the GRB collapsar model by Stan Woosley (1993).

In particular, with the Swift satellite, Kouveliotou discovered short-term GRB (once with durations of less than two seconds and with durations of around 30 seconds), which may in part originate from mergers of neutron stars (instead of collapses).

Kouveliotou is particularly known for her discovery of magnetars (1998), pulsars with extremely high magnetic fields, which she discovered on repetitive gamma-ray flashes ( Soft Gamma Repeater , SGR) with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, which was started in 1996 . SGR's had been known since 1979, their interpretation as magnetars came from Robert C. Duncan and Christopher Thompson (1992, 1995). Koveliotou and colleagues succeeded in demonstrating the particularly strong magnetic fields used for the explanation.

In 2003 she received the Bruno Rossi Prize . In 2012 she received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics . She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (whose Astrophysics Division she chaired) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . She was director of the American Astronomical Society's High Energy Astronomy Division. In 2013 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , in 2015 to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences , and in 2016 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

She was married to the astrophysicist Jan van Paradijs .

Fonts

• with RC Duncan, C. Thompson Magnetare , Spectrum of Science, May 2003
• Editor with Ralph Wijers, Stan Woosley Gamma Ray Bursts , Cambridge University Press 2012
• Editor with Joseph Ventura, Ed van den Heuvel The neutron star-black hole connection , Kluwer 2001
• C. Kouveliotou: Magnetars. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 96, Number 10, May 1999, pp. 5351-5352, PMID 10318885 , PMC 33576 (free full text).

Web links

Commons : Chryssa Kouveliotou  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Portrait at NASA

Individual evidence

1. ↑ J. Hjorth et al. a. A very energetic supernova associated with the gamma-ray burst of 29 March 2003 , Nature, Volume 423, 2003, pp. 847-50
2. ↑ With magnetic field strengths a hundred times higher than with normal radio pulsars, with SGR 1806-20 Gauss ${\displaystyle 8\cdot 10^{14}}$
3. ↑ Kouveliotou et al. a. An X-ray pulsar with a superstrong magnetic field in the soft big gamma-ray repeater SGR1806-20 , Nature, Volume 393, 1998, pp. 235-237, abstract
4. ↑ Press Release AIP ( Memento of March 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
5. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences : Newly Elected Fellows. In: amacad.org. Retrieved April 22, 2016 .