qsoabslines.org - Author & Contributors

QUASAR ABSORPTION LINES

About the Author and Contributors

Christopher W. Churchill

Professor of Astronomy

New Mexico State University

ASTRO HOME: http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/cwc/ORCID HOME: 0000-0002-9125-8159NASA/ADS: Refereed PublicationsLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-w-churchill/Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/christopherwchurchillX/Twitter: @ChurchillQSOabsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/cwc2112

Chris Churchill is a Professor of Astronomy at New Mexico State University. He has three decades of experience conducting astronomical research in the field of quasar science and has published more than 100 refereed scientific journal articles as well as an additional 150 scientific papers and abstracts. He is a regular user of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Keck 10-meter telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal in Atacama Desert in Chile. He is an award-winning author of popular science articles. His research has been featured on the video-based series PBS Spacetime, as live interviews on multiple National Public Radio programs and various national and international television productions, and as feature articles in New Scientist, Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, Discover Magazine’s “Top 100 Scientific Stories,” The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. He has graduated 10 PhD students in the field of quasar absorption lines and has taught graduate-level courses on astronomical spectroscopy for over 20 years. The textbook Quasar Absorption Lines is the consummation of these experiences. In his spare time (haha), he likes to travel with his wife Kelly and perform clasic rock in local clubs (though its been a few years since the last performance, sadly).

Contributors

Foreword by Max Pettini

Much gratitude for your encouragement and wisdom Max. And thank you for the heartfelt Foreword.

Professor Max Pettini (FSR) was elected to the Royal Society in 2010. He is a long-standing and world respected observational astronomer who has practiced his profession at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, the University of Western Australia, the Royal Greenwich Observatory and The Institute for Astronomy at The University of Cambridge. He has studied quasar absorption lines with emphasis on chemical abundances in Lyman Break Galaxies, Damped Lya Absorbers, and the Milky Way interstellar medium. He has been involved in the development of high-resolution spectrographs on major telescopes. Max has also had a central role in the development of high precision deuterium abundance measurements, for which he and collaborator Ryan Cooke were awarded the highly prestigious 2025 Gruber Cosmology Prize. Max was also the 2008 recipient of the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Team Proof

These individuals get a big shout out for reading and re-reading virtually all chapters and marking typos, bad grammar, missed punctuation, and pointing out overall inanity. I made the errors, they found most of them. For those errors that remain... I take full responsibility for having made them in the first place! Also, a big thank you to Rachel Marra and Kelly Sanderson who also contributed to proofing.

Double thank to Asif Abbas for reading some chapters twice and helping with some plots.

Asif Abbas

Farhan Hasan

Stephanie Ho

Bryson Stemoch

Mark Croom

Ezra Huscher

Additional Accolades

My wife - Kelly has been the most supportive and patient partner ever! We have put so much on hold for me to finish this. She has been carrying more than her share of the day-to-day load. If there is such thing as a "writer's widow," she has experienced it. Looking forward to getting back to both fun and normal life stuff. Thank you!

George Becker - George engaged in many back and forth emails. He provided his full suite of high-redshift quasar spectra for my use and digitized some of his previous published data for me. He was generally generous. He was also very helpful for discussions on the Epoch of Reionization.

Gwen Rudie - Gwen generously made a special plot for me illustrating her complex Voigt profile fitting of a high-redshift absorbers with multiphase ionization. She also took time to explain to me her detailed approach to a hairy absorption line system!

Sameer - Sameer worked very hard with me to help ensure I properly described his cutting-edge multi-cloud multiphase ionization modeling methods accurately. He also generously modeled a system of my choice and created the plot that appears in that chapter. He also did some proofing of the text as well, for which I am most grateful.

There are several others who also provided small bits of data and spectra. If I have not named you here, please know that your contributions and/or encouragements are highly valued. Thank you to all the authors of the amazing research papers who approved the use of their scientific illustrations. Finally, I would like to think my closest collaborators, Glenn Kacprzak, Haste Nateghi, Nikole Nielsen, Jane Charlton, Sameer, Ben Oppenheimer, and Bart Wakker. They have been so generously patient with me as I literally stepped away from our collaborative research efforts while working to finalize this book. And yet, they each continued to included me and give me shared credit as if I was still making useful contributions (which I wasn't!). Thank you team. Looking forward to getting back into the game.

Unrelated Moments Along the Journey

Well... if you are still scrolling, here are a few candid moments along the journey of research and writing... (thank you for visiting!):