31 December 2011

Laursen and Stritzinger among top Swedish astrophysicists in 2011

DARK affilliated scientists, Peter Laursen and Maxi Stritzinger, were named 1st and 3rd most cited Sweden-based astrophysicists in 2011, respectively.  Both are post doctoral researchers at the University of Stockholm's Oskar Klein Center. 

Laursen's 2010 paper with Jesper Sommer-Larsen and Alexei O. Razoumov, Intergalactic Transmission and its Impact on the Lyα Line, found a new way to look into the age of reionization. They have figured out exactly how the light from hydrogen atoms traveling between cold clouds dispersed between the galaxies, and how to recognize the traces of reionization in the so-called Lyman alpha forest.

Stritzinger and his colleagues found that four type Ia supernovae in Fornax A, provided a unique test of the precision of distance determinations. The 2010 paper, The Distance to NGC 1316 (Fornax A) From Observations of Four Type Ia Supernovae, outlines how it is possible to measure these distances to a relative precision of 3-4%.

The top 5 cited astrophysics papers were hailed by Popular Astronomi, Sweden's leading popular science magazine in astronomy and space research. Link to the article