The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
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Grant Tremblay

Center for Astrophysics
Astrophysicist
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Grant Tremblay
grant.tremblay@cfa.harvard.edu

About

Dr. Grant Tremblay is an Astrophysicist in the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, a Lecturer at the Harvard College Observatory, and the head of the Lynx X-ray Observatory Science Support Office at the CfA. Previously, he was a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich, and an Astronomer at ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Grant also supports Flight Operations for the Chandra X-ray Observatory as part of the High Resolution Camera Instrument Principal Investigator Team.

Dr. Tremblay's research group employs highly multiwavelength techniques, using data from the world's most powerful ground- and space-based observatories to better understand star formation amid energetic feedback from supermassive black holes. His portfolio consists of more than eighty refereed publications, over $1.5M in NASA funding, and two books for the general public. He is also heavily involved in the development of future space missions, including instrumentation for a notional Europa Lander as well as Lynx, a NASA-funded Large Mission Concept study now under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Ph.D. Astrophysics

Telescopes and Instruments

Chandra

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA’s flagship X-ray observatory, providing essential data on everything from the environment surrounding newborn stars to the emissions from hot plasma inside galaxy clusters. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), as part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, manages Chandra’s day-to-day operations, providing spacecraft control, observation planning, and data processing for astronomers. Chandra is one of NASA’s orbiting Great Observatories, along with the Hubble.

Visit the Chandra Website
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Lynx X-Ray Observatory

The Lynx X-ray Observatory is a proposed X-ray space telescope, designed to be the next generation following NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s upcoming Athena Telescope. This observatory will be able to take images of a larger area of the sky in X-ray light with better resolution than any existing telescope, allowing astronomers to study the first supermassive black holes, the hot gas surrounding galaxies as they evolve, and radiation from the earliest stars. Researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and other universities are presenting Lynx to NASA for consideration in the 2020 Decadal Survey, with a proposed launch date in the mid-2030s.

Visit the Lynx X-Ray Observatory Website
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Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)

Black holes are found in the centers of most galaxies, where they can influence star formation and the distribution of atoms in the environment surrounding them. However, direct observation of a black hole is difficult because it is so small relative to their masses. Founded by Shep Doeleman at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first image ever taken of a black hole: specifically, the ring of light produced by matter just as it falls into the black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy M87. The EHT is a virtual observatory consisting of telescopes spanning the planet, from Greenland to the South Pole. The international collaboration operating the EHT includes observatories affiliated with the Center for Astrophysics: the CfA’s Submillimeter Array (SMA) and the Greenland Telescope.

Visit the EHT Website
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