Tod R. Lauer

Tod R. Lauer
Born1957 (age 66–67)[citation needed]
Ohio, United States[citation needed]
Alma materCaltech
UC Santa Cruz
AwardsNASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1992)
Scientific career
FieldsAstronomy
InstitutionsNSF NOIRLab
Princeton University
ThesisHigh resolution surface photometry of elliptical galaxies (1983)
Doctoral advisorSandra M. Faber

Tod R. Lauer (born 1957)[citation needed] is an American astronomer on the research staff of the NSF NOIRLab. He was a member of the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera team, and is a founding member of the Nuker Team. His research interests includes observational searches for massive black holes[1] in the centers of galaxies, the structure of elliptical galaxies, stellar populations, large-scale structure of the universe, and astronomical image processing.[2] He was the Principal Investigator of the Destiny JDEM concept study,[3] one of the precursors to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission. Asteroid 3135 Lauer is named for him. He appears in an episode of the documentary series Naked Science.[4] He joined the New Horizons Pluto team in order to apply his extensive experience with deep space imaging to the New Horizons data, yielding significantly clearer and mathematically accurate images of Pluto and Charon.

  1. ^ Lauer, T. R.; et al. (2007). "The Masses of Nuclear Black Holes in Luminous Elliptical Galaxies and Implications for the Space Density of the Most Massive Black Holes". Astrophysical Journal. 662 (2): 808–834. arXiv:astro-ph/0606739. Bibcode:2007ApJ...662..808L. doi:10.1086/518223. S2CID 26415900.
  2. ^ Lauer, T. R. (1999). "Combining Undersampled Dithered Images". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 111 (756): 227–237. arXiv:astro-ph/9810394. Bibcode:1999PASP..111..227L. doi:10.1086/316319. S2CID 16376086.
  3. ^ Benford, D. J.; Lauer, T. R. (2006). Mather, John C; MacEwen, Howard A; De Graauw, Mattheus W. M (eds.). "Destiny: a candidate architecture for the Joint Dark Energy Mission". Proceedings of the SPIE. Space Telescopes and Instrumentation I: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter. 6265: 626528. arXiv:astro-ph/0608413. Bibcode:2006SPIE.6265E..28B. doi:10.1117/12.672135. S2CID 7504996.
  4. ^ "IMDB Entry for Naked Science episode #78, 'Hubble's Amazing Universe'". IMDb.