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Space Telescope Science Institute . Newsletter
26
Newsletter . Space Telescope Science Institute
Roeland van der Marel
The Institute Fellowship Program
Ron Allen, STScI rjallen@stsci.edu
W ith the cooperation of the
HST Project Office at
Goddard Space Flight
Center, the Institute created a
Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in
the mid­1980s in order to enhance the
research atmosphere
and boost science
staff morale after the
Challenger disaster
led to additional
delays in launching
HST. This program,
and later its Hubble
Fellow analog,
stimulated the careers
of some of the best
young people in the
field and created a
pool of highly­
qualified astronomers
from which the
Institute has greatly
benefited in recruiting personnel.
In the wake of the round of budget­
cutting which culminated in the staff
reductions of July 1994, the IF
program was discontinued in order to
maintain operational capabilities. The
last IF was Mark Dickinson, who has
recently gone on to a Davis Fellowship
at JHU.
The demise of the IF program has
been lamented by many members of
the science staff, and a proposal to re­
create this program using internal
research funds was adopted last year.
The purpose remained much the same
as before, namely, to offer the
opportunity for exceptionally­gifted
young researchers to devote their full
energies to astronomy and astrophysics
in the stimulating environment at
STScI. Patterned after the highly­
successful Hubble Fellow program,
Institute Fellows have complete
freedom to carry out a research
program unencumbered by other
functional duties for up to three years
and, in addition, have at their disposal
an annual research budget for travel,
publications, and equipment expenses.
An announcement for the first
Institute Fellowship was placed in
Physics Today and in the AAS job
register in the fall of 1996. This
generated 220 applications, even
exceeding the number of applicants for
the Hubble Fellows Program of that
year. This demonstrates not only that
we have struck the right chord in
creating this Fellowship, but also
confirms that the Institute is widely
considered to be one of the most
stimulating environments to pursue an
astronomical research career. After a
rigorous selection process, Roeland
van der Marel was picked to be the
first STScI Fellow.
Roeland received undergraduate
degrees in astronomy and mathematics
from Leiden University in the
Netherlands. He continued his PhD
studies at the same institution, under
the supervision of Professors Tim de
Zeeuw and Marijn Franx. With them
and several other collaborators,
including James Binney, Roger Davies,
Simon White and Hans­Walter Rix, he
worked on a variety of topics related to
the dynamics of galaxies. In 1994 this
resulted in a thesis ``Velocity Profiles
and Dynamical Modeling of Galaxies,''
for which the University awarded him
its annual C.J. Kok Prize. The main
emphasis in Roeland's work was on
the properties of the nuclei of galaxies,
and on the possible presence and
prevalence of black holes. Among
other things, the ground­based
observations of M87 in his thesis
revealed rapid gas motions in the
nucleus that could be ascribed to the
gravitational influence of a black hole;
this was subsequently confirmed by
HST through the detection of the well­
known gas disk.
After his thesis, Roeland accepted a
Hubble Fellowship at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton to work
on his proposed research project
``Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei,''
under the supervision of Professor
John Bahcall. He obtained observa­
tions with the HST/FOS of various
galaxies, and paid special attention to
the case of M32. His observations of
this galaxy provide the highest spatial
resolution stellar­kinematical measure­
ments obtained to date with the HST.
Interpretation with state­of­the­art
dynamical models shows that there
must be a three­million­solar­mass
dark object in the center of M32,
contained within the central 0.3 parsec.
The implied density leaves few other
options except to infer that the object
must be a black hole. The stellar
motions in the nucleus of M32 are
nicely illustrated by an animation that
Roeland made on the basis of N­body
simulations done on the Cray T3D of
the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
This animation is available from
http://oposite.stsci.edu/
pubinfo/mpeg/m32anim.mpg
or from Roeland's home page, http://
sol.stsci.edu/~marel which
also describes his research interests in
more detail.
At STScI, Roeland will continue his
research on the structure and dynamics
of galaxies. Among other things, he
will use NICMOS in Cycle 7 to study
the structure, density and brightness of
a sample of merger­remnants. He is
also involved in studies of the gas disks
in NGC 7052 and IC 1459, in a study
of the ultraluminous IRAS galaxy
NGC 6240, and in a ground­based
study of the dynamics of the stars in
the nucleus of the dense globular
cluster M15. Future plans include the
construction of dynamical models to
better interpret the ongoing
microlensing observations towards
the LMC, and observations and
modeling of lensed quasars to study
the structure of dark halos of interme­
diate redshift galaxies.
We have just advertised for the
second Institute Fellowship; a copy of
the advertisement is posted elsewhere
in this Newsletter.