Kelle Cruz is an
astrophysicist who specializes in studying
brown dwarfs
Brown dwarfs (also called failed stars) are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen ( 1H) into helium in their cores, unlike a main-sequence star. Instead, they have a mass between the most m ...
. She currently works as an associate professor at
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...
in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. With her study of brown dwarfs, Cruz hopes to better understand planets outside the
Solar System
The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar S ...
and map out the
universe
The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. Acc ...
, saying, "I hope that what I’m doing in our little bit of the galaxy is similar to what the explorers did by discovering and mapping the New World and North America."
Kelle is co-PI of the Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) research group.
Further reading
*
Publications
# 2MASS 22344161+4041387AB: A Wide, Young, Accreting, Low-mass Binary in the LkHa233 Group
# Measuring Tiny Mass Accretion Rates Onto Young Brown Dwarfs.
# Young L. Dwarfs Identified in the Field: A Preliminary Low-Gravity, Optical Spectral Sequence from L0 to L5.
# A Sample of Very Young Field L Dwarfs and Implications for the Brown Dwarf "Lithium Test" at Early Ages
# The Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project (BDKP)I. Proper Motions and Tangential Velocities for a Large Sample of Late-type M, L, and T Dwarfs
Awards and honors
* Fellow of the
American Astronomical Society
The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes spoken as "double-A-S") is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the AAS is to promote the adv ...
, 2022
* Spitzer Fellowship, 2007
* NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2004
* NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2001
* NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (Honorable Mention), 2000
* APS Corporate Minority Scholar, 1998 & 1999
[ ]
See also
*
List of astronomers
The following is a list of astronomers, astrophysicists and other notable people who have made contributions to the field of astronomy. They may have won major prizes or awards, developed or invented widely used techniques or technologies within as ...
(includes astrophysicists)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cruz, Kelle
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American astrophysicists
American women astronomers
American women astrophysicists