The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

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Bradford Wargelin

Center for Astrophysics

astrophysicist

Bradford Wargelin

bwargelin@cfa.harvard.edu

About

I'm an astrophysicist in the Calibration group of the Chandra X-ray Center, primarily working on the Low Energy Transmission Grating (LETG) and its associated detectors, ACIS-S and HRC-S. My Ph.D. research was on high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy and laboratory atomic physics, and nowadays I use data from Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Swift to study various aspects of stellar astrophysics such as solar/stellar wind charge exchange, coronal X-ray/UV spectra, and stellar cycles, all of which apply to my work on Proxima Centauri.

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

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