New book shares the stories of women astronomers as they revolutionize a historically male-dominated field
Credit: Princeton University Press
The Sky Is for Everyone (published June 21st, 2022 ) is an internationally diverse collection of personal essays by trailblazing female astronomers working in a male-dominated field during a transformative era in astronomy. With 37 autobiographical chapters by women astronomers born in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, France, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Romania, Israel, Zimbabwe, India, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan, this anthology serves as an inspiration to current and future generations of scientists.
Included within this collection is the co-founder and the current director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dr. Vicky Kalogera’s essay “Not Taking ‘No’ for an Answer: Learning How to Persist and Persevere with a Smile”.
Kalogera is an expert in the astrophysics of compact objects, black holes and neutron stars, the death remnants of stars, studying their formation and evolution especially in systems of multiple stars. She is a leading astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, LIGO being the special kind of ‘telescopes’ that first detected gravitational waves in 2015, waves that were first predicted to exist by Einstein a hundred years earlier. Kalogera is also at the forefront of the emergent field of gravitational-wave astronomy and uses data analysis and astrophysical modeling to understand the universe’s population of black holes and neutron stars. Over the years she has also served as member or chair on important professional committees, namely she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
Purchase the book here.