General Colloquium:
General Colloquium:November 15 - 4:00pm Phys 223
(Coffee at 3:30p.m. in room 242)
Associate Provost and the Bruno Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics at MIT and is Director of the Center for Space Research.
The High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (HETGS) on the Chandra X-ray Observatory is a powerful tool for studying the astrophysical properties of X-ray emitting objects. Emission and absorption lines and features can probe the physical properties of stellar winds, relativistic jets, supernova remnants (SNRs), active galactic nuclei and the intergalactic medium. Examples include active stellar corona, the wind from a hot O star, the abundances and dynamics of young oxygen-rich SNRs, the jet structure in SS433, and the properties of warm absorbers in active galactic nuclei. I will give a brief introduction to the Chandra HETGSand present an overview of these results, illustrating the application of plasma diagnostics to probe the astrophysical properties of these and similar sources.
Professor Canizares is the Associate Provost and the Bruno Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics at MIT and is Director of the Center for Space Research. He is a principal investigator on NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, leading the development of the High Resolution Transmission Grating Spectrometer for this major space observatory, and is Associate Director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center. He has also worked on several other space astronomy missions, including as Co-investigator on the Einstein Observatory (HEAO-2). His main research interests are high resolution spectroscopy and plasma diagnostics of supernova remnants and clusters of galaxies, cooling flows in galaxies and clusters, X-ray studies of dark matter, X-ray properties of quasars and active galactic nuclei, and gravitational lenses. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Associated Universities Inc., the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council, and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. He served on the NASA Advisory Council and was chair of the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council and NASAÕs Space Science Advisory Committee. Professor Canizares received the BA, MA and Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He came to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow in 1971 and joined the faculty in 1974 progressing to professor of physics in 1984. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Canizares has authored or co-authored more than 170 scientific papers.
This page last modified on