Samaya Nissanke

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Samaya Michiko Nissanke (* 1978 in London ) is a British astrophysicist.

Nissanke's father was from Sri Lanka, the mother from Japan. She studied physics at Cambridge University with a master's degree and then went to the Paris Observatory. In 2007 she received her doctorate at the Institute for Astrophysics in Paris (dissertation: Theoretical aspects of the shape of gravitational waves for the spiral and merging phases of binary compact systems). As a post-doctoral student , she was at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory , at Caltech . In 2013 she became an assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen . At Radboud University, she was the group leader of the gravitational wave group and received the TOP and Vidi Grant from the Dutch research organization NWO in 2016 after the first direct discovery of gravitational waves became known. She has been Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam since 2018 , where she is a spokesperson and member of GRAPPA (Gravitational AstroParticle Physics Amsterdam), a center of excellence for gravitation and astroparticle physics, at the Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy and at the University's Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEF).

Nissanke is considered a pioneer in multi-messenger astronomy, the simultaneous observation of gravitational waves and other signals, which first took place in GW170817 (merging of neutron stars that previously formed a binary star system). She also recognized the possibility of using such measurements to obtain a new value for the Hubble constant (determined to be H = 68 in 2019).

She is a member of the LIGO and Virgo collaborations. She is also in the BlackGEM group of the La Silla Observatory , worked with the radio telescope systems VLA , LOFAR and MeerKAT (Karoo Array Telescope in South Africa).

For 2020 she received the New Horizons in Physics Prize .

Fonts (selection)

  • with Mansi Kasliwal: On Discovering Electromagnetic Emission from Neutron Star Mergers: The Early Years of Two Gravitational Wave Detectors, Arxiv 2013
  • with Daniel Holz u. a .: Exploring Short Gamma-ray Bursts as Gravitational-wave Standard Sirens , Astroph. J., Volume 725, 2010, pp. 496-514. arXiv: 0904.1017. Arxiv
  • with Jonathan Sievers, Neal Dalal: Localizing compact binary inspirals on the sky using ground-based gravitational wave interferometers , Astroph. J., Volume 739, 2011, p. 99, Arxiv

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ LIGO / Virgo Collab., A gravitational-wave measurement of the Hubble constant following the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo , 2019
personal data
SURNAME Nissanke, Samaya
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nissanka, Samaya Michiko
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1978
PLACE OF BIRTH London