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CXC Biographies: Dr. Joan M. Centrella
Astrophysicist, Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Dr. Joan M. Centrella is an astrophysicist in the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where she leads the Numerical Relativistic Astrophysics Group. Prior to her arrival at Goddard in April 2001, she was a professor in the Department of Physics at Drexel University. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and her B.S. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Her research effort is primarily concerned with modeling astrophysical sources of gravitational radiation, such as coalescing binary black holes. These sources are governed by the intense gravitational fields predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Realistic models of the actual merger of the black holes can only be achieved through the use of large scale computer simulations, which serve as computational laboratories for studying these sources. The merger of black holes produces gravitational waves, or ripples in the curvature of spacetime. In the case of massive black holes such as those at the centers of merging galaxies, the resulting gravitational waves can be detected by the planned Laser Interferometric Space Antenna (LISA) mission, which is a NASA/ESA collaboration.
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