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Heidi Jo Newberg
Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy
Contact:
(518) 276-2652
newbeh@rpi.edu
Home Page: http://www.rpi.edu/~newbeh/
Education:
Ph.D., University of California, Berkley.
Career Highlights:
Newberg has worked in many areas of astronomy over the course of her career. She did her Ph.D. with the Berkeley Automated Supernova Search, which measured the supernova rates as a function of supernova type in Virgo-distance galaxies; and the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), which is measured the cosmological parameters Omega and Lambda using the light curves of distant supernovae. She shared the Gruber Cosmology Prize for her work with SCP.
She helped to build the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which imaged ~10,000 square degrees of the sky in five optical filters, and obtained over a million spectra of galaxies. She initiated the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) project in SDSS II, which obtained spectra for 250,000 Galactic stars.
She has published papers in diverse areas of galactic and extragalactic astronomy, including: supernova phenomenology, measuring cosmological parameters from supernovae, galaxy photometry, color selection of QSOs, properties of stars, astronomy education, and the structure of our galaxy.
Research Interests:
Newberg is the head of Participants in LAMOST, US (PLUS), which is proposing to collaborate with the Chinese LAMOST project to obtain 2.5 million spectra of Galactic stars, using a new 4m-class telescope that can obtain spectra for 4000 objects at the same time and is now taking data at Xinglong Observatory in China. She also runs MilkyWay@home, a volunteer computing platform that supplies about a PetaFLOPS of computing power (equivalent to the largest supercomputers) to her research projects, which include finding the best model of the Milky Way and running n-body simulations of Milky Way evolution.
Newberg’s current research is primarily related to understanding the structure and evolution of our own galaxy through using stars as tracers of the Galactic halo and disks. These stars in turn are used to trace the density distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way.
Selected Publications:
1. Newby, M., Newbery, H. J., Simones, J., Cole, N., and Monaco, M., “F Turnoff Distribution in the Galactic Halo Using Globular Clusters as Proxies,” Ap. J., submitted, 2011
2. Harrigan, M. J., Newberg, H. J., et al., “Statistical properties of blue horizontal branch stars in the spheroid: detection of a moving group ~50kpc from the Sun,” MNRAS, 405, 1796, 2010
3. H. J. Newberg, B. A. Willett, & B. Yanny, “The Orbit of the Orphan Stream,” Ap. J., 711,32, 2010
4. H. J. Newberg, B. Yanny, & B. A. Willett, “Discovery of a New, Polar-Orbiting Debris Stream in the Milky Way Stellar Halo,” Ap.J.Lett., 700, 61, 2009
5. B. Yanny, H. J. Newberg, et al., “Tracing Sagittarius Structure with SDSS and SEGUE Imaging and Spectroscopy,” Ap. J., 700, 1282, 2009
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