Valentin Ivanov (astronomer)

Valentin D. Ivanov (Bulgarian: Валентин Д. Иванов) is a Bulgarian astronomer working in the European Southern Observatory, mainly at the Paranal site. Among his primary research areas are the dynamics of star clusters, formation of stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets around such objects.

Valentin Ivanov and Ray Jayawardhana are two of the pioneers of the investigation of the planemos, a special cast of exoplanets. They discovered the first double planemo Oph 162225-240515. This discovery, came just before the debate about the 2006 planet definition, and posed the problem about the distinction between planets and low-mass stars (brown dwarfs)

Background

Valentin D. Ivanov was born in the town of Bourgas, Bulgaria in 1967. He obtained his master's degree in physics and astronomy at the University of Sofia in 1992. He earned a PhD degree at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, U.S. in 2001. He became a fellow at the European Southern Observatory, Cerro Paranal, and since 2003 he has been a staff astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, Paranal where he is instrument scientist for the wide-field near-infrared camera VIRCAM mounted at the VISTA (telescope). In 2006, together with Kiril Dobrev, he has published a science fiction story collection in Bulgarian.

External links

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