Fiona Harrison

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Fiona Anne Harrison (* 1964 ) is an American astrophysicist .

Harrison graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1985 and received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993 . As a post-doctoral student , she was a Robert Millikan Research Fellow at Caltech , where she became Assistant Professor in 1995, Associate Professor in 2001 and Professor of Physics in 2005. From 2013 she was Benjamin M. Rosen Professor and from 2015 she held the Kresa Leadership Chair .

Fiona Anne Harrison is a researcher in high energy observational astrophysics and is a senior scientist at NuSTAR . The satellite mission examines the high-energy X-ray spectra (3 to 79 k eV ), for example of neutron stars, gamma-ray flashes, black holes and supernova remnants. She also developed instruments for NuSTAR with her laboratory and was the scientific director for the first two years of the mission from 2012 to 2014. Among other things, the distribution of radioactive materials in the gas cloud of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A was mapped with conclusions for the core collapse mechanism the supernova, the spins of stellar and supermassive black holes were determined and a magnetar was discovered near the center of our galaxy. The mission investigated an ultra-bright X-ray source (URS) in the galaxy M82, a magnetized neutron star and pulsar with an accretion disk and companion star. One of NuSTAR's research goals is, among other things, the development of black holes, the formation of elements in supernovae, the galactic center and other barriers for axions as candidates for dark matter, but also solar observations.

Before that, she was involved in the X-ray telescope missions Chandra, Swift, XMM and Fermi with accompanying observations with the optical telescopes of Caltech (Keck, Mount Palomar). Harrison and colleagues discovered signs of jet formation in the afterglow of the gamma-ray burst GRB 990510 in 1999.

In 2013 she received NASA's Outstanding Public Leadership Medal . In 2015 she received the Bruno Rossi Prize for fundamental work on supernova residues, neutron stars and black holes with NuSTAR, the first X-ray satellite for wavelengths below 0.1 nanometers and X-ray energies above 10 keV (laudation). For 2020, Harrison was awarded the Hans A. Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society . She is an honorary doctorate from the Danish Technical University in Lyngby, a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Grefenstette, Harrison et al. a., Asymmetries in core-collapse supernovae from maps of radioactive 44Ti in CassiopeiaA, Nature, Volume 106, 2014, pp. 339–342, Arxiv
  2. ↑ Kaya Mori, Harrison et al. a., NuSTAR discovery of a 3.76-second transient magnetar near Sagittarius A * , Astroph. J., Volume 770, 2013, L23
  3. ↑ M.Bachetti, Harrison et al. a., An Ultraluminous X-ray Source Powered by An Accreting Neutron Star , Nature, Volume 514, 2014, pp. 202-204
  4. ↑ Harrison et al. a., Optical and Radio Observations of the Afterglow from GRB990510: Evidence for a Jet, Astroph. J. 523, 1999, L 121-L124, Arxiv
  5. ^ Rossi Price
  6. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter H. (PDF; 1.2 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved November 16, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Harrison, Fiona
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harrison, Fiona Anne (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1964