Despite having known me for various lengths of time, some of my friends have gone on to achieve greatness. Some still communicate regularly with me and many will still accept my phonecalls! I don't think anyone has made a million bucks yet, if you are a friend of mine, current or former, and you have made a million bucks, please contact me immediately about an exciting business opportunity.
The Pillars Of Astronomy circa 1995. Sobriety unknown.
The Pillars Of Astronomy after receiving PHD's. Here is a smaller version. Note change in attire.
The Pillars Of Astronomy at Seattle AAS meeting, January 2003.
David Wilner (NOT an evil character from the famous Batman TV Show) used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer to perhaps detect the signature of some planets orbiting a forming star. His team's results have been described in the national press and in Sky and Telescope. His results combined with those of another team were recently highlighted in an online article at "womanlinks.com". This newage site applauded Wilner for finding what cannot be seen. Read the article yourself.
Edward Murphy, a veritable giant among astronomers, was prominently featured in a recent NYT article summarizing the 199th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. Ed presented observations from the FUSE satellite that show that the galactic fountain theory can work. He is also well-known for a particular prank involving the VLA, along with some of the other characters mentioned on this page.
Brenda Frye ended up quoted in the NY Times recently after having been on a NOVA special called the Runaway Universe. She discovered the dark matter profile of a galaxy cluster from data obtained during a lensed galaxy redshift survey at the Keck Observatories...very heady stuff. The NY Times quipped "Brenda Frye, [...] already seems assured of a career in the exclusive science of cutting-edge astronomy". She has come a long way since her days in the frigid computer room at Steward Observatory, plugging away at Fortran code!
Rex Saffer finally got a payoff for his long years of effort studying blue straggler stars and may have determined that the formation mechanism for these stars is the rapid merger of two other main sequence stars and not the slow coalesence of binary stars. In a study reminiscent of the famous Millikan oil-drop experiment, Rex and his collaborators found that several BSS in NGC6397 have masses very nearly equal to integer multiples of the cluster turn-off mass. Since slow coalesence of a binary would decrease the system mass through mass-loss mechanisms, this evidence points to a rapid merger, or collisional, scheme for BSS formation. Nifty!
Todd Tripp (or Todd Tripp) and collaborators found the 'missing' Hydrogen in the Universe.
Ramón Valadez is serving as a representative in the Arizona State Legislature for Arizona District 10.
Jason Kendall is slowly gaining fame as a producer of successful off, off broadway productions. Although he worked in the top floors of the World Trade Center Tower, he was late to work on the the fateful day of 9-11-01. He has recently purchased a sexy sports car for his commute to New Jersey where Cantor Fitzgerald is now based.
Brian Schmidt helped lead an observing project that measured the redshifts of very distant supernovae. The observations of the world-wide collaboration have led astronomers to believe that the Universe is not only expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating. Note that this implies the universe will die slowly over time, becoming darker and colder as all the light elements are used up by stars. Consider Dr. Schmidt as the ultimate doom and gloom expert.
Ian Dell'Antonio participated in a project that used weak lensing to map out cosmic Dark Matter. He is also one of those guilty of VLA pranksterism.
Lynne Hillenbrand produced a fantastic thesis focused on Ae/Be stars and attempting to determine the IMF for gas clouds that have produced at least one star and tried to figure out if all stars form simultaneously in these clouds or if the process is spread out (among other things). She also produced a stunning series of papers covering the Orion Nebula Cluster. She is currently a proud Mom and active researcher holding the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar position at Caltech. She knows nothing about reputed rumors of large radio telescope facilities ever being offered for sale (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
Kevin B. Marvel marvel@aas.org
