Karl Glazebrook

Karl Glazebrook ( born May 11, 1965 in Chatham, Kent) is an Anglo - Australian astronomer and cosmologist, who deals with the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark energy. Known to the public was Glazebrook with a thesis on the " color" of the universe.

Biography

Karl Glazebrook was born in 1965 in Chatham. He studied physics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge and his doctorate in 1992 at the University of Edinburgh with a study on infrared astronomy. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Durham in 1993, he returned back to Cambridge, where he worked for old galaxies in a research group at the observation of up to 8 billion years. This project succeeded in Glazebrook, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope to resolve the problem of the faint blue galaxies and thereby provide decisive contributions to the study of the early universe.

In 1995 he went as astronomer to the Anglo - Australian Observatory ( AAO ) to Sydney. There he was responsible for the visual tools for creating the 2dF galaxy Rotverschiebungskarte. Glazebrook developed together with Joss Hawthorn the nod -and- shuffle method, with the resolution of the ground-based telescopes could be significantly increased. During his time at the AAO Glazebrook was instrumental in the development of the Perl Data Language (PDL ), an open -source alternative to the programming language IDL.

In 2000 he moved to Johns Hopkins University to Baltimore, where he was appointed in 2004 as professor of astronomy. Glazebrook was one of the responsible scientist for the Gemini Observatory, a task which he continued when he claimed Australia for the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing Swinburne University of Technology joined in Melbourne 2006.

Karl Glazebrook is one of the leaders of the Gemini Deep Deep Survey and the GLARE project, are investigated with the galaxies from the early universe. Through these projects, it was shown that massive galaxies were formed much earlier than previously thought. Also succeeded in Glazebrook along with Chris Blake, an improved method for measuring the oscillation of baryons ( baryon acoustic oscillation, BAO ) to develop, can be examined with the indirect dark energy.

With (March 2008) more than 230 publications and over 14,000 citations Glazebrook is one of the most cited astronomers of the present.

According to Karl Glazebrook of Asteroid ( 10099 ) Glazebrook was named in 2000.

What color is the universe?

The most famous publication Glazebrooks originated as a "byproduct " of the 2dF Rotverschiebungskarte in which some 200,000 galaxies were taken. During the measurements, the age of the galaxy was determined by their color. While young stars have a bluish expression in their emission spectrum, take the red components during the evolution of stars on the red giant to increase.

Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry then asked themselves, what "average" color are the stars observed and calculated for all the measured emission spectra from a mean value. Glazebrook looked at the determined color as a " bizarre intellectual exercise " because they could be observed only from a hypothetical point at which all stars would be equally far away and the stars would not move (to suppress the redshift ).

In a first publication in January 2002, referred Glazebrook and Baldry the color of the universe as a pale turquoise. Two months later, she did have to correct her statement, as was calculated too low by an incorrect white balance of the red component of the color. The actual color of the universe was now reported as a light beige color, the RGB color space to the RGB values ​​= { 255, 248, 231 } Decimal, RGB = FFF8E7 was specified in hexadecimal.

As the determined values ​​corresponded to any named color, Karl Glazebrook called for name suggestions. According to a survey among astronomers from Johns Hopkins University, the term cosmic latte won ( Cosmic Latte ) because the beige similar macchiato with milk foam of a latte. The beige color was later confirmed by measurements of the European Southern Observatory.