MIT will host one of the first five recipients of new astrophysics postdoctoral fellowships funded by the AXAF Science Center and NASA. A second recipient is an MIT graduate.
Edward Moran, a graduate of Columbia University, will spend three years at MIT investigating topics broadly related to the scientific mission of the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF).
AXAF, the third of NASA's Great Observatories after the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, is the largest and most sophisticated X-ray telescope ever built. When it is launched in December of this year, AXAF's high resolution will provide new information about exploding stars, black holes, colliding galaxies, and other extremely hot regions of the universe.
David Buote (PhD '95) also received an AXAF Postdoctoral Fellowship. His host institution is the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Competition for the AXAF Post-doctoral Fellowships was open to all recent astronomy and astrophysics graduates worldwide. The AXAF Fellowship Program is a joint venture between NASA and the AXAF Science Center in cooperation with the host institutions.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 1, 1998.