About CV Projects Posters Outreach

I am a an assistant research scientist at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University, where I am part of Prof. Maryam Modjaz's SNYU group. I am also a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

I am interested in figuring out which stars explode as different types of supernovae by using observations of the supernovae and the galaxies in which they explode. In my PhD thesis, completed in 2013 under the supervision of Profs. Dan Maoz (TAU) and Michael Shara (AMNH), I measured the rates at which thermonuclear, or Type Ia, supernovae exploded in three surveys that used both imaging and spectroscopy.

In 2012, my thesis was one of 12 animated by Jorge Cham of PhD Comics:



On 5 February 2016, I was interviewed about my research by Fraser Cain on Universe Today's Weekly Space Hangout:



Besides research, I take part in public outreach. I am a AAS Astronomy Ambassador and a mentor in the Science Research Mentoring Program at the American Museum of Natural History.

In my free time, I write fiction, in Hebrew and English, and read as much as I can. I am also interested in the history, politics, and culture of ancient Rome, political science, and experiencing the world by living somewhere else every once in a while.


Curriculum Vitae
Publications [ ADS | astro-ph ]
Ph.D. thesis  [ ADS | pdf ]

Address
CCPP, New York University
4 Washington Place
Meyer Hall, Room 533
New York, NY 10003
USA
Voice: +1-(212)-922-7454
E-Mail: orgraur @ nyu.edu


Projects


Current Highlight: In Graur et al. (2016), we observed the Type Ia supernova SN 2012cg more than 1000 days after it exploded. Instead of a sharp drop in its light, as predicted by the "infrared catastrophe," we saw the light gradually wane, consistent with predictions that at these late times, the light of the supernova would be dominated by the radioactive decay of 57Co. Surprisingly, we needed a mass ratio of 57Co/56Co twice as high as that in our Sun - higher than the ratio assumed by most explosion models.


Discovering Supernovae in Galaxy Spectra
Supernovae can be discovered in large-scale spectroscopic galaxy surveys, where in some galaxies a supernova will serendipitously explode in the area covered by the spectral aperture.

  • The rates of Type Ia supernovae in SDSS DR7 galaxy spectra: Graur & Maoz (2013)
  • Correlations between Supernova Rates and Galaxy Properties: Graur et al. (2015)

    • Measuring Supernova Rates in Volumetric Supernova Surveys
    CLASH, CANDELS, and the Frontier Fields: optical and near-IR supernova surveys

  • CLASH Type Ia supernova rates: Graur et al. (2014a)
  • CANDELS Type Ia supernova rates: Rodney et al. (2014)
  • Three strongly-lensed supernovae in CLASH: Pate et al. (2014)
  • The first strongly-lensed, multiply-imaged supernova: Kelly et al. (2015)

    • A Survey for Supernovae in the Subaru Deep Field

  • Type Ia supernova rates to redshift 2: Graur et al. (2011)
  • A polar-ring galaxy in the Subaru Deep Field: Finkelman, Graur & Brosch (2011)
  • Initial results: Poznanski et al. (2007)

    • Experiments With Individual Supernovae
  • The discovery of 57Co in the late-time light curve of SN2012cg: Graur et al. (2016)
  • Constraining the progenitor of SN2011fe with HeII observations: Graur et al. (2014b)

    • Statistics and Data Analysis
    Data Analysis for 1st-Year Undergraduate Physics Lab

    A Statistics Handbook (In Hebrew)
    Also available from the Tel-Aviv University Neiman Library of Exact Sciences.



    Posters


    Click on any of the posters for the full-resolution version.

    Course Summaries

    Feel free to download the following summaries from my B.Sc. in Physics, but be advised that they are all in Hebrew.
    1st year | 2nd year | 3rd year


    Education and Outreach


    The Science Research Mentoring Program

    		Since 2011, I have been a mentor in the Science Research Mentoring Program (SRMP) at the American Museum of Natural History. Each year, I mentor 3-4 high-school students by giving them a research project that is part of my wider work. My students have searched for supernovae in Hubble Space Telescope images, digitized catalogs of variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds, and studied the evolving periodicity of Cepheids.

    Some of my students have been featured in Shelf Life, a web-series about the collections of the museum. Two of my students presented their work in the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, WA in 2015.

    American Museum of Natural History Science Bulletins I am the science advisor for the astronomy Science Bulletins produced by the American Museum of Natural History, in which we report on current research in astrophysics.



    During my graduate studies at Tel Aviv University, I was one of the organizers of the Tel Aviv University AstroClub, an outreach unit led by graduate students that organized physics and astronomy talks and events for the general public.


    Webpage designed with the kind help of Keren Sharon.