Edo Berger

I moved

I am currently a Hubble fellow and a Carnegie-Princeton fellow at the Carnegie Observatories

At the Very Large Array and inside the prime focus cage of the Palomar 200-in telescope

 

I am a fifth-year graduate student at the Caltech Department of Astronomy. I received my B.S. degree in Astrophysics from UCLA, with a thesis that presented the first accurate measurements of the total and differential cross sections of the reaction . My thesis advisor was Prof. Ben Nefkens

 

Research on Gamma-Ray Bursts and Supernovae

Currently, I am working with Prof. Shri Kulkarni at Caltech and Dr. Dale Frail at NRAO on Gamma-Ray Burst afterglows and host galaxies, as well as radio emission from Type Ib and Ic supernovae. The main goal of my thesis is to study the properties of GRB engines and their relation to supernovae through an investigation of their energetics. Among other things, this involves multi-wavelength modeling of GRB afterglows and modeling of radio emission from supernovae. The second part of my thesis involves a broad-band (radio, submillimeter, and optical/NIR) investigation of GRB host galaxies. This project aims to study the global properties of the sample and to place GRB hosts in the context of other galaxy samples. I am also working on interstellar scintillation of radio afterglows with Prof. Ramesh Narayan at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. For these projects I am using the Very Large Array, the Australia Telescope Compact Array, the James Clark Maxwell Telescope, and the Keck and Palomar telescopese.

 

Research on Brown Dwarfs

Over the past three years I have also been working on a search for radio emission from brown dwarfs using the Very Large Array and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. This project began with the discovery of radio emission from the brown dwarf LP944-20 - the first example of such activity in brown dwarfs. Since then I have detected radio emission from three additional sources indicating that magnetic fields are prevalent at the bottom of the main sequence and are possibly correlated with rotation velocity.

 

Curriculum Vitae, Publications, & Press Releases