Nicholas B. Suntzeff
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Nicholas B. Suntzeff (b. 1952, Berkeley, CA) holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Astronomy in the Department of Physics at Texas A&M University. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astronomical instrumentation. Suntzeff received his B.S. with distinction in mathematics from Stanford University in 1974 and his Ph.D. in astronomy & astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory in 1980.
Suntzeff, with Brian P. Schmidt, co-founded the High-z Supernova Search Team in 1994 that used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe[1]. This universal acceleration implies the existence of dark energy and was voted the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine.[2] The fundamental calibration for distances to Type Ia supernovae was invented by the Calan/Tololo Supernova Survey[3], founded by Mario Hamuy, Jose Maza, Mark M. Phillips, and Suntzeff. The Survey, formed after encouragement by Allan R. Sandage in 1989, ran from 1989-95, and provided the pioneering method to measure precision distances to external galaxies[4], leading to a precise value of the Hubble constant[5][6] and the discovery of acceleration.
Prior to 2006, he was the Associate Director of Science at the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and Astronomer at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. From 1982-1986 he was a Carnegie/Las Campanas Fellow at the Mount Wilson & Las Campanas Observatories, now called the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science. He has been received the Robert J. Trumpler Award, the Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2007, and twice the AURA Science Award.[7]
He is a native of San Francisco, CA and Corte Madera, CA. He is the paternal grandson of Matvei Adrianovich Evdokimov, one of the principal arms manufacturers in czarist Russia, located in Izhevsk.
[edit] References
- ^ Riess, A. et al. 1998, Astronomical Journal, 119, 1009; see also Perlmutter, S. et al. 1999, Astrophysical Journal, 517, 565
- ^ Science, 282, 2156-2157 (18 December 1998)
- ^ Hamuy, M. et al. 1993, Astronomical Journal, 106, 2392
- ^ Hamuy, M., et al. 1996, Astronomical Journal, 112, 2438
- ^ Suntzeff, N.B. et al. 1999, Astronomical Journal, 119, 1175
- ^ Freedman, W. et al. 2001, Astrophysical Journal, 553, 47
- ^ AURA Science Awards
[edit] External links
- Nicholas Suntzeff's web page at Texas A&M
- High-Z Supernova Team's web page
- ESSENCE Supernova Project
- Carnegie Supernova Project
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