Frank Winkler (Physics) has recently been awarded funding from the NASA-supported Space Telescope Science Institute for two research projects related to observations made from the Hubble Space Telescope earlier this year. The project Stellar Life and Death in M83: A Hubble-Chandra Perspective, in collaboration with an international team of scientists from the US and Australia and led by colleague at Johns Hopkins University, is conducting the most detailed study ever undertaken of the galaxy M83, some 15 million light years away. Known as the “southern pinwheel,” it has produced six supernovae over the past century — more than any other galaxy except one.
The project The Remarkable Young Supernova Remnant in NGC 4449, in collaboration with colleagues at STScI, Dartmouth, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will focus on the remains from a supernova that probably occurred 60-100 years ago. Although no sightings of this event were recorded at the time, today its remnant is the brightest such object known in the universe.