Jacqueline Hewitt | |
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| Born | September 4, 1958 Washington, D.C. |
| Alma mater | Bryn Mawr College Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Awards | Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics |
| Thesis | A search for gravitational lensing (1986) |
| Doctoral students | Christopher Williams |
Jacqueline Nina Hewitt (born September 4, 1958) is an American astrophysicist. She was the first person to discover an Einstein ring. She is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
Hewitt was born in Washington, D.C., on September 4, 1958, to parents Warren E. Hewitt, a retired international lawyer from the State Department, and Gertrud (Graedel) Hewitt. She attended Bryn Mawr College where she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics in 1980. [1] Hewitt took an astronomy class at Haverford College her sophomore year, which sparked her interest in science. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate school. During her graduate studies, she began studying gravitational lensing using the Very Large Array radio telescope. Hewitt obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1986. [2] Some sources erroneously state that she received her Ph.D. in 1988. [3] [4]
Hewitt was appointed with a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT as part of the Very-long-baseline interferometry unit from 1986 to 1988. While analyzing the data from her graduate studies, she found a ring on her computer screen. This ring, part of the gravitational lens system MG1131+0456, ended up being the very first Einstein ring discovered. Since Hewitt's groundbreaking discovery, many other Einstein rings have been discovered, and were found to be far more common than astronomers thought. Einstein rings are important because they can help answer questions about the size and the fate of our universe. Hewitt worked as a researcher at Princeton University's Department of Astrophysical Sciences in 1988. After one year of researching at Princeton, she returned to MIT as an assistant physics professor, working as a full-time professor since 1989. Hewitt is also the principal investigator for the Radio Astronomy Group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. [3] [4] Since 2002, Hewitt has been appointed Director of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. [5]
In 1990, Hewitt won the David and Lucile Packard Foundation fellowship. For her work on gravitational lenses, her colleagues at MIT nominated her for the 1995–1996 Harold E. Edgerton Award. In 1995, Hewitt was the recipient of the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award [3] [4] and in 1989 the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy for her work in radio astronomy.
She was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020. [6]
Hewitt has two children: Keith Hewitt Redwine, born in 1988, and Jonathan Hewitt Redwine, born in 1993. [3] [4]
Rainer "Rai" Weiss is an American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.
An Einstein ring, also known as an Einstein–Chwolson ring or Chwolson ring, is created when light from a galaxy or star passes by a massive object en route to the Earth. Due to gravitational lensing, the light is diverted, making it seem to come from different places. If source, lens, and observer are all in perfect alignment, the light appears as a ring.
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