Vassiliki Kalogera

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vassiliki "Vicky" Kalogera ( Greek Βασιλική «Βίκυ» Καλογερά , * 1971 in Serres ) is a Greek astrophysicist and astronomer.

Kalogera studied physics at the University of Thessaloniki with a bachelor's degree (Ptychio) in 1992 and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , where she received her master's degree in 1994 and her doctorate in astronomy with Ronald Webbink in 1997 ( Formation of low mass X-ray binaries ). As a post-doctoral student , she was at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics . From 2001 she was at Northwestern University , where she became Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Physics and Astrophysics in 2009 . There she was co-founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), of which she is director.

It deals with the formation, development and behavior of compact objects ( white dwarfs , neutron stars , black holes ) in astrophysics, such as their electromagnetic and gravitational wave radiation. Among other things, she predicted that short gamma-ray bursts arise from the merger of orbiting neutron stars (via the formation of a black hole with an accretion disk made of nuclear matter). Among other things, she dealt with the question of a mass gap between the heaviest neutron star (about 2 solar masses) and black holes (from about 5 solar masses), X-ray binary stars and millisecond pulsars as well as gravitational waves and is a member of the LIGO collaboration, where she deals with the astrophysical implications of the gravitational wave signals discovered in 2015.

She received the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award from the American Physical Society (APS), the Annie Jump Cannon Prize for Astronomy (2002), the Hans A. Bethe Prize (2016) and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics (2018). She also received the NSF Career Award in Astronomy and a Simons Foundation Fellowship, and was a Packard Fellow. In 2018 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ K. Belczynski, R. O´Shaughnessy, V. Kalogera, F. Rasio, R. Taam, T. Bulik: The lowest-mass stellar black holes: catastrophic death of neutron stars in gamma-ray bursts, Astroph. J., Volume 680, 2008, L 129-L132, Arxiv
personal data
SURNAME Kalogera, Vassiliki
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kalogera, Vicky (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek astrophysicist and astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Serres (Greece)