Bethany Cobb is awarded the 2009 Dirk Brouwer Prize in Astronomy!

It is our great pleasure to announce that Bethany Cobb was selected by the Faculty of the Yale Department of Astronomy as the 2009 Recipient of the Dirk Brouwer Prize in Astronomy for her excellent Ph.D. thesis.

Bethany Cobb is now serving as a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkely. Her dissertation was Long-term observations of GRBs: the complex connection between GRBs and SNe.

A gamma-ray burst (GRB) is a quick blast of high energy photons that is brilliant enough to be observed at extreme distances (many from distances more than half the universe from Earth). For her thesis, she observed the optical and infrared light that often accompanies these bursts using the SMARTS 1.3m telescope in Chile. She tracked how these bursts behave with time in an attempt to understand why these events occur. A leading theory suggests that one class of these bursts results from supernovae (SNe), which are the explosive deaths of special massive stars. She observed such SNe following two GRBs. However, her work, in conjunction with that by other groups, also suggests that the formation scenario for GRBs is more complex tha previously believed.

The above Appeared in the Yale University Astronomy Department Newsletter, Fall 2008, Vol. 1, No. 1.