Slavko Bogdanov
Slavko Bogdanov is an Associate Research Scientist at the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University. He was a CIFAR Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2011, supervised by Cosmology and Gravity Fellow Vicky Kaspi in the Department of Physics, McGill University. He completed his PhD in Astronomy at Harvard University in 2008, and before coming to McGill, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard College Observatory, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Slavko also received his Master’s degree from Harvard and his Bachelor of Science degree from Pennsylvania State University.
Slavko is an observational astrophysicist who studies neutron stars – extremely small stars that nonetheless have a huge mass. His research focuses on using neutron stars to uncover the poorly understood properties of extremely dense matter, one of the principal unsolved problems in subatomic physics. As the central densities of neutron stars exceed even those found in the nuclei of atoms (about 10-100 trillion times denser than lead), these exotic objects serve as valuable physical laboratories for probing this extreme density regime that cannot be explored elsewhere. Through careful observations of the X-rays emitted from the surface of neutron stars and the use of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, Slavko is aiming to accurately determine the physical sizes and masses of these stars, which in turn would reveal important information about the dense matter in their interior.
Slavko is an observational astrophysicist who studies neutron stars – extremely small stars that nonetheless have a huge mass. His research focuses on using neutron stars to uncover the poorly understood properties of extremely dense matter, one of the principal unsolved problems in subatomic physics. As the central densities of neutron stars exceed even those found in the nuclei of atoms (about 10-100 trillion times denser than lead), these exotic objects serve as valuable physical laboratories for probing this extreme density regime that cannot be explored elsewhere. Through careful observations of the X-rays emitted from the surface of neutron stars and the use of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, Slavko is aiming to accurately determine the physical sizes and masses of these stars, which in turn would reveal important information about the dense matter in their interior.