Robert Knop
Vanderbilt Extragalactic Astronomy
Research Interests
- Research Group — Collaborators & Students
- Papers
- General Interests
- Specific Projects
- Previous Projects
![[AGN art]](agn_smtr.png)
General Interests
My general research interests revolve around the topics of galaxy formation and evolution, galaxy mergers and interactions, starburst galaxies, and active galactic nuclei... and the connections between all of those things.
Specific Projects
- Spectroscopic 0bservations of the global kinematics and star formation activity distributed across interacting galaxy systems. (Poster shown at the AAS in Washington DC, Jan. 2006.)
- Observations of minute and hour timescale variability in Blazars.
- Use of infrared spectroscopy to peer deep into the dust that obscures the central regions of interacting, starburst, and Seyfert galaxies.
- Using the infrared to search for the core-collapse supernovae that ought to be present in dust-obscured starburst galaxies (project led by Rachel Gibbons).
Previous Research Projects
I graduated from Caltech with a Ph.D. in Physics; my thesis was on Spatially Resolved Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Seyfert Galaxies. Here is a gzipped Postscript copy of my thesis. (Some of the embedded images are a little batty, and may cause trouble with some readers; sorry about that.)
Between 1996 and 2005, I was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project. I was there for the 1998 announcement in which we (and another supernova team) discovered the acceleration of the Universe's expansion; this was credited as the 1998 "discovery of the year" by Science Magazine. In 2003, I published a paper doing the cosmological and galaxy extinction analysis on 11 supernovae observed with the HST.