News from the Chair

Gregory Taylor Promoted to Full Professor

The Deprtment of Physics and Astronomy is proud to announce that Greg Taylor has been promoted to Full Professor.

Taylor is the Director of the Long Wavelength Array (LWA).

The Long Wavelength Array (LWA) will be a new multi-purpose radio telescope operating in the frequency range 10-88 MHz. Scientific programs include pulsars, supernova remnants, general transient searches, radio recombination lines, solar and Jupiter bursts, investigations into the "dark ages" using redshifted hydrogen, and ionospheric phenomena. The first station of the LWA, called "LWA1", is located near the center of the VLA and has begun scientific operations as a stand-alone instrument with collecting area roughly equivalent to a 100m dish. The LWA1 images the sky in realtime using the "transient buffer - narrowband" (TBN) system which is operational with 260 dipoles, and a bandwidth of 70 kHz. The LWA1 can also form up to 4 beams on the sky simultaneously with 16 MHz bandwidth in each of two tunings and full polarization. Early results include observations of pulsars, the Sun, and Jupiter. The LWA1 is supported by NSF as a University Radio Observatory and as such is open for use by the international community. More information about the LWA is available from the LWA web pages at http://lwa.unm.edu.

Besides working on many low-frequency projects with LWA1, Taylor also studies active galaxies and their environments using a number of facilities such as the Very Large Array (VLA), Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), Chandra X-ray telescope, and the Fermi gamma-ray Large Area Telescope. Open questions are understanding the feedback mechanism between the host galaxy and the AGN power output, and the role of magnetic fields in the formation of powerful jets from AGN.

Congratulations to Greg on this well-deserved promotion. We wish him a long and successful career in our department.