Science - Evolution of Galaxies: People: Peter Eisenhardt

Postdoctoral Research with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
WISE will survey the entire sky with 500 times better sensitivity than IRAS at 12 and 23 microns, and 500,000 times better sensitivity than COBE at 3.3 and 4.7 microns. WISE will launch in late 2009, surveying the sky in 6 months after a one month checkout, and finding objects ranging from near-Earth asteroids to optically invisible quasars. Other objectives include finding the nearest and coolest brown dwarfs, massive galaxy clusters to redshift 1, and the most extreme infrared luminous galaxies in the universe. The successful candidates will use the WISE dataset, complemented by other large datasets, to identify near-Earth asteroids, cool brown dwarfs, distant galaxy clusters, ultraluminous infrared galaxies, and very red quasars (either due to obscuration or extreme redshift), and follow them up using facilities such as Palomar, Keck, Spitzer, Chandra, and HST. JPL has a share of Palomar 200 inch time. Depending on the research topic, Dr. Peter Eisenhardt or Dr. Amy Mainzer, respectively project scientist and deputy project scientist for WISE, will serve as JPL postdoctoral advisor to the selected candidate(s). The appointee will be guided by the JPL advisor to ensure that the research work will result in publications in the open literature.

WISE
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a four-channel, super-cooled infrared telescope designed to survey the entire sky with 1,000 times more sensitivity than previous infrared missions.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Current Positions

Principal Scientist
Project Scientist for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

Eisenhardt, P.R. et al., The IRAC Shallow Survey, Astrophysical Journal Supplement, 154, 48 (2004)
de Propris, Roberto, Stanford, S. Adam, Eisenhardt, Peter R., and Dickinson, Mark, "The K-selected Butcher-Oemler Effect," Astrophysical Journal, 598 (2003)
Eisenhardt, P. and Wright, E.L., "Next generation sky survey (NGSS), in IR Space Telescopes and Instruments," edited by John C. Mather, Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 4850, p. 1050 (2003)
Stern, Daniel, Eisenhardt, Peter, Spinrad, Hyron, Dawson, Steve, van Breugel, Wil, Dey, Arjun, de Vries, Wim, and Stanford, S. A., "Evidence against a redshift z > 6 for the galaxy STIS123627+621755," Nature, 408, 560 (2000)
de Propris, Roberto, Stanford, S. A., Eisenhardt, Peter R., Dickinson, Mark, and Elston, Richard, "The K-Band Luminosity Function in Galaxy Clusters to Z 1," Astronomical Journal, 118, 719 (1999)
Simpson, Chris and Eisenhardt, Peter, "The Detection and Photometric Redshift Determination of Distant Galaxies Using SIRTF's Infrared Array Camera," Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 111, 691 (1999)
Stanford, S. A., Eisenhardt, Peter R., and Dickinson, Mark, "The Evolution of Early-Type Galaxies in Distant Clusters," Astrophysical Journal, 492, 461 (1998)
Eisenhardt, Peter R., Armus, Lee, Hogg, David W., Soifer, B. T., Neugebauer, G., and Werner, Michael W., Hubble Space Telescope Observations of the Luminous IRAS Source FSC 10214+4724: A Gravitationally Lensed Infrared Quasar, Astrophysical Journal, 461, 72 (1996)