Stuart L. Shapiro

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Stuart Louis Shapiro (born December 6, 1947 in New Haven , Connecticut ) is an American theoretical astrophysicist who deals with numerical general relativity and its application in astrophysics , especially on compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes.

Shapiro studied at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1969, at Princeton University with a master's degree in 1971 and a doctorate in astrophysics in 1973. He was then at Cornell University , where he became a professor in 1975. In 1996 he became Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . He is a recognized expert in the numerical simulation of astrophysical phenomena in the context of general relativity with supercomputers and has written two standard works about it.

Among other things, he investigated the physics of black holes and neutron stars, gravitational collapse and the formation of black holes, the formation of gravitational waves, for example when neutron stars or black holes spiral into one another in a binary star system, the dynamics of the N-body problem for a very high number of bodies, cosmological Questions (big bang nucleosynthesis etc.), neutrino astrophysics. He simulated the spectrum of radiation that arises when gas falls from the accretion disk onto black holes and neutron stars and the destruction and swallowing of stars around a supermassive black hole in a galaxy, the collision and merging of black holes and the formation of supermassive black holes in galaxies from a relativistic, collision-free gas and from the collapse of an unstable relativistic star cluster. He demonstrated that toroidal black holes can arise as transition states in a gravitational collapse and that naked singularities can arise when collision-free matter occurs under otherwise reasonable initial conditions, which violates the cosmic censorship hypothesis. He has also been working on the question of possible gravitational wave signals and their creation for observation in gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO for a long time .

In 2017 he received the Hans A. Bethe Prize for objective and sustainable contributions to the understanding of physical processes in astrophysics of compact objects and for further developments in numerical relativity (laudation).

In 1979 he was a Sloan Research Fellow and 1989/80 Guggenheim Fellow . In 1998 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1990 he received the Forefronts of Large Scale Computing Award and in 1991 first prize in the IBM Supercomputing Competition.

He has been married since 1971 and has a son and a daughter.

Fonts

  • With Thomas W. Baumgarte : Numerical Relativity. Solving Einstein's Equations on the Computer. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • With Saul A. Teukolsky : Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars: The Physics of Compact Objects. Wiley, 1983.
  • Editor with Teukolsky: Highlights of Modern Astrophysics. Concepts and Controversies. (Cornell Conference, 1984), Wiley, 1986.
  • Shapiro, Teukolsky: Black Holes, Naked Singularities and the Violation of Cosmic Censorship, American Scientist, Volume 79, 1991, p. 330
  • Shapiro, Teukolsky: Formation of Naked Singularities: The Violation of Cosmic Censorship, Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 66, 1991, p. 994

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Shapiro, Teukolsky, Winicour, Toroidal Black Holes and Topological Censorship, Phys. Rev. D., Vol. 52, 1996, p. 6982
  2. ↑ Hans Bethe Prize 2017
personal data
SURNAME Shapiro, Stuart L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shapiro, Stuart Louis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH New Haven , Connecticut