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Robinson

Andrew Robinson


Professor


Office: 76-1270


Phone: 585-475-2726


axrsps@rit.edu
 

Andy Robinson received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Manchester in 1985. After graduating, he worked as a post-doc at the European Southern Observatory and at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge. He was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 1990 and held this appointment for 10 years before becoming a member of the faculty in the Department of Physical Sciences at the University of Hertfordshire. In Fall 2003 he crossed the Atlantic to join the Physics Department at RIT. Dr Robinson's main areas of expertise are astronomical spectroscopy and spectropolarimetry and the astrophysics of photoionized gases. His research interests focus on nuclear activity in galaxies and in particular the processes that regulate energy release by accretion onto supermassive black holes.

Dr Robinson is the Astronomy Minor advisor and the current Director of the Astrophysical Sciences and Technology Graduate Program.
Selected Recent Publications

“Spectropolarimetric Evidence for a Kicked Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar E1821+643”, Robinson, A., Young, S., Axon, D.J., Kharb, P., Smith, J.E., Astrophys. J. Lett. 717, L122 (2010).

“A Displaced Supermassive Black Hole in M87”, Batcheldor, D.; Robinson, A.; Axon, D. J.; Perlman, E. S.; Merritt, D., Astrophys. J. Lett. 717, L6 (2010).

“The Contribution from Scattered Light to Quasar Galaxy Hosts”, Young, S.; Axon, D. J.; Robinson, A.; Capetti, A., 2009, Astrophys. J., 698, L121 (2009).

“The Rotating Wind of the Quasar PG 1700+518”, Young, S., Axon, D.J., Robinson, A., Hough, J.H., Smith, J.E., Nature, 450, 74–76 (2007).

“The nature of the HE0450-2958 system”, Merritt, D.; Storchi-Bergmann, T.; Robinson, A.; Batcheldor, D.; Axon, D.; Cid Fernandes, R., Mon. Not. R. astr. Soc., 367, 1746 (2006).

“Seyferts on the edge: polar scattering in Type 1 Seyfert nuclei”, Smith J. E., Robinson A., Young S., Axon D. J., Corbett Elizabeth A., Mon. Not. R. astr. Soc., 350, 140 (2004).


Recent Talks

Reflections on Kicked Supermassive Black Holes, Lunch talk at the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, RIT, 20 August, 2010

Reflections on Kicked Supermassive Black Holes, Colloquium at the Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Sheffield, 30 July 2010

Probing gas flows around supermassive black holes with Spectropolarimetry  “What drives the growth pf black holes? Workshop at the University of Durham, UK, 26-29 July, 2010

 
Press releases

 



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