Jeremy Mould | |
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.jpg) Mould in 2001 | |
| Born | Jeremy Richard Mould (1949-07-31)31 July 1949 (age 76) Bristol, England |
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| Fields | Astronomy |
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| Thesis | The Lower Main Sequence and the Atmospheres of M Dwarfs (1976) |
| Doctoral advisor | Harry Hyland |
Jeremy Richard Mould (born 31 July 1949) is an Australianastronomer currently at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing atSwinburne University of Technology.[1] Mould was previously Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at theAustralian National University and the AmericanNational Optical Astronomy Observatory.[2] He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow, at the University of Melbourne.[3]
Mould was born 31 July 1949 inBristol, England, and emigrated to Australia in 1963.[4] He graduated from theUniversity of Melbourne, andAustralian National University with a PhD.[5] He was research fellow atKitt Peak National Observatory, and professor at theCalifornia Institute of Technology.
Mould's work atCaltech during the early 1980s aimed to determine both the size and the age of the Universe by identifying and calibratingStandard Candles, that is, very bright stars whoseAbsolute Magnitude can be accurately measured when near the Earth, with more distant examples being identified by their colour, spectrum, or in the case ofCepheid Variables, the period of oscillation of their brightness. Other important work included the measurement of luminous evolved red giants in star clusters of the Magellanic Clouds, which he did in collaboration with Marc Aaronson. Also in collaboration with Marc Aaronson and John Huchra, Mould undertook measurements of the Hubble Constant that would eventually extend to the use of the Hubble Space Telescope and the WFPC2 camera to study Cepheid variables and use them as standard candles. Mould was on the science team for the WFPC2 camera that helped to restore the Hubble Space Telescope's image quality, correcting spherical aberration in the primary mirror.
In collaboration withGary DaCosta andMichael David Crawford, Mould preparedHertzsprung Russell Diagrams ofLarge Magellanic Cloud andSmall Magellanic CloudGlobular Clusters to determine their age, with the resultingStandard Candle being the brightest star in each cluster, with that star's absolute luminosity being derivable from its distance, with theB-R Color of the brightest cluster's star being used to determine the ages of more distant clusters by the colours of their brightest stars.[6][7][8]
TheMagellanic Clouds are smallgalaxies that orbit theMilky Way Galaxy, with the distance from Earth to theLarge Magellanic Cloud being 157,000 light years and that of theSmall Magellanic Cloud being 200,000.
During the Summer of 1983, Mould, daCosta and Crawford extended this work to a distance of 2.5 million light years by recordingCCDspectrograms ofGlobular Clusters orbiting theAndromeda Galaxy at theCassegrain Focus of the Five MeterHale Telescope atPalomar Mountain Observatory, with theStandard Candle being determined by the expectation that the spectra of each cluster as a whole would be dominated by the spectrum of the brightest star in it.
According toISI Highly Cited he is among the highest cited astronomers in the world.[9] Asteroid18240 Mould is named in his honour. Mould was awarded theGeorge Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1981 withMarc Aaronson, theNewton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1984 withMarc Aaronson, and theGruber Prize in Cosmology in 2009 withWendy Freedman andRobert Kennicutt.
He was elected a Legacy Fellow of theAmerican Astronomical Society in 2020.[10]
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