Gibor Basri facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Gibor Basri
Born	May 3, 1951 New York, USA
Nationality	USA
Known for	brown dwarf
Scientific career
Fields	physics, astrophysics, astronomy
Institutions	University of California, Berkley

Gibor Basri (born May 3, 1951) is an American astrophysicist. He is now a Professor Emeritus (a retired professor who keeps their title) in the Astronomy department at U.C. Berkeley. His work focused on how stars behave, how they form, and studying small stars and brown dwarfs. He also helped make the university a more fair and welcoming place for everyone.

Gibor Basri's Early Life

Gibor Basri was born in New York City on May 3, 1951. His father, Saul Basri, was a physics professor. His mother, Phyllis Basri, taught modern dance. His father came from Iraq and his mother from Jamaica. They both met while studying at Columbia University.

Gibor grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his younger brother David. His family lived for short times in Burma (in 1957) and Sri Lanka (in 1965). In 1974, he met his wife, Jessica Broitman. She became a psychoanalyst, helping people with their thoughts and feelings. Their son was born in 1991.

Education and Special Awards

Gibor Basri studied physics at Stanford University, graduating in 1973. He then earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado in 1979. His main research was about how light travels through stars and how stars are active. He used observations from the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) satellite for his studies.

After his Ph.D., he received a special award that took him to the U.C. Berkeley astronomy department in 1979. In 1982, he became a professor there. He became a full professor in 1994 and officially retired in 2015, but he still works on projects.

He has received many honors, including:

• A Miller Research Professorship in 1997.
• Being named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer in 2000.
• A NASA Faculty Fellowship in 2002.
• Becoming a Fellow of the California Academy of Science in 2011.
• The Chancellor's Award for Increasing Institutional Excellence in 2005.
• The Berkeley Citation (the highest honor from the campus) in 2015.
• The Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization in 2016, for making science easy to understand for everyone.
• Being elected a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2023.
• Receiving the Arthur B.C. Walker Award in 2024.

His Career in Science

Discovering Brown Dwarfs

Early in his career, Gibor Basri worked on observing stars using high-energy light. This helped prepare for the launch of the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) satellite. In the 1980s, he started studying how stars are born, focusing on young stars called T Tauri stars. He also continued to study how stars' magnetic fields make them active.

In the 1990s, he was one of the scientists who helped discover brown dwarfs. These are objects that are bigger than planets but too small to be stars. He became a world expert on them. As part of this work, he created a way to figure out the age of young star clusters using something called "lithium dating." This method showed that these clusters were much older than previously thought. His discoveries are explained in the book 50 Years of Brown Dwarfs. He also wrote an important article called Brown Dwarfs to Planetesimals: What is a Planet? with Michael Brown.

Studying Stars with the Kepler Mission

In the 2000s, he became a Co-Investigator for NASA's Kepler Mission. This mission used a space telescope to look for planets outside our solar system. He used the very precise light measurements from many stars to study how starspots behave. Starspots are like sunspots on our Sun. This helped him learn more about how stars' magnetic fields work. In 2022, he published a technical book called An Introduction to Stellar Magnetic Fields.

Working for Fairness and Inclusion

Besides his science work, Gibor Basri also worked to make universities more fair and welcoming for everyone. From 2007 to 2015, he was the first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at U.C. Berkeley. He helped create a plan for fairness and inclusion on campus. He also played a big part in surveys about the campus environment. He helped make sure that fairness was considered when hiring new staff, promoting people, and reviewing programs at the university.

Selected Publications

Here are some of the important papers Gibor Basri has written or helped write:

• Basri, G., "The Discovery of the First Lithium Brown Dwarf: PPI 15."
• Bertout, C., Basri, G., and Bouvier, J., “Accretion Disks around T Tauri Stars”.
• Valenti, J. A.; Basri, G.; Johns, C. M., "T Tauri Stars in Blue".
• Basri, G.; Marcy, G. W.; Graham, J. R., "Lithium in Brown Dwarf Candidates: The Mass and Age of the Faintest Pleiades Stars".
• Basri, G., "Observations of Brown Dwarfs".
• Reiners, A.; Basri, G., "The First Direct Measurements of Surface Magnetic Fields on Very Low Mass Stars".
• Reiners, A.; Basri, G., "A Volume-Limited Sample of 63 M7-M9.5 Dwarfs. II. Activity, Magnetism, and the Fade of the Rotation-Dominated Dynamo".
• Basri, G., Shah, R., "The Information Content in Analytic Spot Models of Broadband Precision Light Curves. II. Spot Distributions and Lifetimes and Global and Differential Rotation ".

See also

In Spanish: Gibor Basri para niños