Daniel Eisenstein

Daniel J. Eisenstein (* 1970 ) is an American astronomer.

Eisenstein received his bachelor's degree in 1992 and his master's degree from Princeton University in 1994 and received his PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1996 with Abraham Loeb . As a post-doctoral student he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (with Piet Hut ) and the University of Chicago . From 2001 he taught first as an assistant professor and later as a full professor at the University of Arizona (Stewart Observatory) before becoming professor of astronomy at Harvard University and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 2010 .

He has been with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) since 1998 and is the director of the third phase of the project (SDSS III) that began in 1990. He deals both theoretically and observationally (and with numerical simulation) with the precise determination of cosmological parameters from the measurement of large structures in the universe and with the evolution of galaxies and the relationship between galaxies and their environment. He is a pioneer of the baryon oscillation method ( Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations BAO, and Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, BOSS, within the framework of SDSS) for the construction of three-dimensional maps of the galaxy distribution in the universe (proposal 1998 with Wayne Hu, Max Tegmark ). It is based on theoretical cosmological considerations that the large network-like structures in the universe emerged from acoustic modes of oscillation (baryonic oscillations) in the hydrogen gas clouds of the early days of the universe (first 400,000 years) with a typical distance scale of 500 million light years today. From the resulting three-dimensional image of the galaxy distribution, he and his colleagues try to obtain precise information about the cosmological parameters and the role of dark energy by comparing them with numerical simulations .

In 2014 he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Shaun Cole and John A. Peacock . Also in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . The asteroid (183287) Deisenstein is named after him.

Fonts

• with Wayne Hu, Max Tegmark: Cosmic Complementarity: and from Combining Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments and Redshift Surveys ${\displaystyle H_{0}}$ ${\displaystyle \Omega _{M}}$ , The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 504, 1998, L57
• with others: Detection of the baryonic acoustic peak in the large-scale correlation function of SDSS luminous red galaxies , Astrophys. J., Volume 633, 2005, 560, Arxiv
• with Lauren Anderson a. a. The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Data Release 9 Spectroscopic Galaxy Sample , Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Soc., 427, 2012, 3435, Arxiv

Web links

• Homepage in Harvard

Individual evidence

1. ↑ BOSS
2. ↑ Harvard Gazette 2012 on Eisenstein