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Star formation and the interstellar medium

24 articles

Axel Brandenburg

Axel Brandenburg, born 1959 in Heide, Germany, is a German astrophysicist and Nordita professor in Stockholm known for work on dynamos, turbulence, cosmic magnetism, and the Pencil Code.

Bengt Strömgren

Bengt Strömgren (1908–1987) was a Danish astrophysicist known for the Strömgren sphere, his theory of ionized hydrogen clouds around hot stars, and the uvbyβ photometric system.

Bruce Elmegreen

Bruce Gordon Elmegreen (born 1950) is an American astrophysicist who spent almost 40 years at IBM Research and is known for work on triggered star formation.

Bruce T. Draine

Bruce T. Draine (born 1947) is an American theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University known for his work on interstellar dust, and author of the standard textbook on the interstellar medium.

Christopher F. McKee

Christopher F. McKee, also cited as C. F. McKee, is a theoretical astrophysicist and emeritus professor at UC Berkeley known for the three-phase interstellar medium model.

David Williams (astronomer)

David Arnold Williams, born 1937, is a British astrochemist and Emeritus Perren Professor of Astronomy at University College London who won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 2009.

Donald Huffman

Donald Ray Huffman (1935–2025) was an American physicist at the University of Arizona who, with Wolfgang Krätschmer, discovered the 1990 carbon-arc method that first produced fullerenes in bulk.

Frank Shu

Frank Shu (徐遐生) was a Chinese-born American theoretical astrophysicist (1943–2023) who developed density wave theory of spiral galaxies and the inside-out model of star formation, winning the 2009 Shaw Prize.

George B. Field

George B. Field (1929–2024) was an American theoretical astrophysicist, founding director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, known for work on the interstellar medium and magnetic fields.

Ira S. Bowen

Ira S. Bowen was an American astrophysicist at Caltech who solved the nebulium mystery in 1927 and directed the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories from 1948 to 1964.

James M. Stone

James M. Stone is a computational astrophysicist and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, known for the ZEUS and Athena astrophysical simulation codes.

James Wadsley

James Wadsley is a computational astrophysicist and professor at McMaster University, lead author of the GASOLINE simulation code used to study planet, star, and galaxy formation.

John Bally

John Bally is an astrophysicist and Professor Emeritus of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, known for research on star formation, protostellar outflows, and stellar feedback.

Kelsey Johnson

Kelsey Johnson is an astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, known for research on star formation and founding Dark Skies, Bright Kids.

Lyman Spitzer

Lyman Spitzer (1914–1997) was an American theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University who proposed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1946, invented the stellarator fusion device, and is the namesake of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Mark R. Krumholz

Mark R. Krumholz, also known as Mark Reuben Krumholz, is a theoretical and computational astrophysicist at the Australian National University, known for work on star formation and the interstellar medium.

Mark V. Hurwitz

Mark V. Hurwitz is an American experimental astrophysicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory who led NASA's CHIPS satellite, launched in 2003, and won a 1997 Presidential Early Career Award.

Matthew R. Bate

Matthew R. Bate (born 1969) is a New Zealand numerical astrophysicist at the University of Exeter who simulates the formation of stars, brown dwarfs, and planets.

Nick Scoville

Nick Scoville, also known as Nicholas Z. Scoville, is a Caltech astronomer known for pioneering millimeter-wave CO observations of star-forming gas and founding the COSMOS survey.

Norman Murray

Norman Murray is a Canadian-based theoretical astrophysicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, known for work on disk winds, planetary migration, and star formation.

P. van der Werf

Paul van der Werf is an astronomer and Professor of Extragalactic Astrophysics at Leiden University's Leiden Observatory, studying star formation, molecular gas, and the interstellar medium of galaxies.

Ralf S. Klessen

Ralf S. Klessen, born 1968, is a German theoretical astrophysicist and professor at Heidelberg University known for his gravo-turbulent theory of how supersonic turbulence controls star formation.

Shu‐ichiro Inutsuka

Shu-ichiro Inutsuka (犬塚 修一郎) is a Japanese theoretical astrophysicist and professor at Nagoya University since 2009, known for work on star and planet formation, molecular clouds, and solar wind simulations.

Steven Balbus

Steven Balbus is an American astrophysicist at Oxford who showed in 1991 that weak magnetic fields make accretion disks turbulent, sharing the 2013 Shaw Prize.