Amy Barger facts for kids

Amy J. Barger (born January 18, 1971) is an American astronomer and a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is known for her important discoveries about the Universe by observing it.

Professor Barger is a leader in using data from many different telescopes. She combines information gathered at different wavelengths (like X-rays or infrared light, not just visible light) to find distant galaxies and huge supermassive black holes that we can't see with our eyes alone. She is also an active member of the International Astronomical Union, a group that brings together astronomers from all over the world.

Amy Barger's Journey in Astronomy

Amy Barger studied astronomy and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning her degree in 1993. She then received a special scholarship called the Marshall Scholarship to study at King's College, Cambridge in the University of Cambridge in England. There, she earned her PhD in astronomy in 1997.

Today, Professor Barger teaches astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also works with graduate students at the University of Hawaii in their Physics and Astronomy Department.

Discoveries About the Distant Universe

Professor Barger's research focuses on what's happening far away in the Universe. She studies things like dusty galaxies, quasars (very bright centers of galaxies), and supermassive black holes. Her work has changed how scientists understand how galaxies and supermassive black holes grow and change over time.

Research at the University of Hawaii

From 1996 to 2000, Amy Barger had a special research position at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. During this time, she was part of a research group called the MORPHS collaboration. This group studied how distant galaxies formed and what they looked like.

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other tools, the group analyzed almost 2,000 distant galaxies. They found that the way galaxies change their appearance and light signals is affected by different timescales and physical processes.

Barger also used a special camera called the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) to find new quasars. She also got to use NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO), which looks at X-rays from space.

In 2000, Barger and her team shared their findings about where the X-ray background (a glow of X-rays coming from all directions in space) comes from. They found that about one-third of this X-ray glow comes from active galactic nuclei (AGNs). These are the bright centers of galaxies that have a huge black hole pulling in gas, which then shoots out X-rays.

The team also discovered that another third of the X-ray background comes from very faint galaxies. These galaxies don't give off much visible light because they are surrounded by a lot of dust or cool gas that blocks the light. The scientists realized they needed even more powerful telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, to learn more about these distant objects.

Following this, Barger led a team that studied black holes. They used several large telescopes, including the Keck 10-meter telescope, to learn about how black holes grow. They found that many black holes in nearby galaxies were much more active recently than scientists had thought. This meant that not all black holes formed at the same time as their galaxies. Instead, some black holes are still growing slowly, taking over a billion years to form.

Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

In 2000, Barger became a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She continued her research and earned grants to support her work.

In 2001, she received the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy for her important research on the X-ray background. In 2002, she won the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy for her excellent work in observing space. She also received a large grant from the Packard Foundation in 2003 to help fund her research.

In 2005, Professor Barger led a study about how black holes and galaxies grow together. Her team used long-exposure X-ray images to see black holes that are usually hidden by gas and dust. They found these black holes were between one and 12 billion light-years away from Earth.

They discovered that the very first black holes, which are part of the early Universe, grew quickly and then stopped getting bigger. However, black holes with a mass between 10 million and 100 million times the Sun's mass continued to grow slowly. The team also found that the formation of stars in a galaxy and the growth of its black hole seem to be connected and happen at the same time. Barger and her team called this shift in star formation "cosmic downsizing." This means that over time, smaller galaxies will become the main places where new stars form.

Barger's research on the early Universe has helped scientists understand "cosmic stratigraphy." This is like creating a timeline of how galaxies and stars formed since the Big Bang by looking at how much their light has shifted towards red (called redshift). The more redshifted a galaxy is, the older, brighter, and farther away it is.

In 2013, Barger and her colleagues published a study about how matter is spread out in galaxies. They found that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is located inside a huge empty space called the KBC Void. As of 2017, the KBC Void is the largest known void in the Universe, with a diameter of about 2 billion light-years. Later, a follow-up study confirmed the existence of this spherical void, which is surrounded by a shell of galaxies, stars, and other cosmic materials.

Honors and Awards

• 1992 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship
• 1993 Marshall Scholarship
• 1999 NASA Hubble Fellowship
• 1999 Chandra Fellow
• 2001 Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy
• 2002 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society
• 2002 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow
• 2003 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow
• 2003 David and Lucille Packard Fellow
• 2007 American Physical Society Fellow
• 2007 Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society
• 2011 Vilas Associates Award at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow
• 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow
• 2017 Kellett Mid-Career Award at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 2021 American Astronomical Society Fellow

See Also

In Spanish: Amy Barger para niños