Dirk Grupe: Swift and the Hunt for Gamma Ray Bursts

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are the most energetic events in the Universe. GRBs were discovered during the cold war by military monitoring satellites. For many decades they remained one of the biggest mysteries in Astronomy. Today we know that GRBs are the explosions of massive stars. Due to their extreme brightness we can discover and observe these events throughout the whole Universe. Because of their fast decay in their brightness, GRBs have been a challenge for astronomical observatories. Only with the launch of the NASA Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer Mission it was possible to access the early phases of these explosions. Swift is controlled from State College, PA. The talk will explain GRBs, in particular describe our Swift GRB observatory, and what is so special about this NASA mission. Dirk Grupe is a senior research associate at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. He came to Penn State in February 2005 to join the NASA Swift Mission Operation center, just a few months after the launch of the NASA Swift Mission. Prior this he held a postdoctoral research position at the Ohio State University. He received his PhD in 1996 at the University of Goettingen in Germany (at the observatory where Karl Friedrich Gauss was the first director). D. Grupe’s primary area of research is Active Galactic Nuclei. These are supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies which are currently active, meaning they accrete matter through an accretion disc onto the black hole. Since joining Swift he has also become interested in Gamma-ray bursts, which mark the death of a massive star through a very violent explosion and the birth of a black hole

Lai'Anna D Martin

12/7/2013 12:00:00 AM