Faculty at Home: McKinley Brumback

Please join McKinley Brumback, Assistant Professor of Physics, for a talk entitled “Beacons in the Sky: X-ray bright neutron stars as extreme physics laboratories.”

Studying space with high energies, such as X-rays, allows astronomers to test our understanding of the laws of physics in the most extreme environments in the universe. One such extreme environment is found around neutron stars—the ultra-dense cores of massive stars left behind after a supernova explosion. Neutron stars host the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields, which can be trillions of times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field and are impossible to recreate in Earth-based laboratories. In this talk, I will discuss ways in which studying X-rays over a range of energies allows us to disentangle signals from different structures around the neutron star and begin mapping these unique environments.

McKinley Brumback is an assistant professor of physics at Middlebury College. She completed her PhD in physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College and then traveled the United States for postdoctoral research positions at Caltech and the University of Michigan. She uses observations from NASA and ESA X-ray observatories to investigate how matter behaves close to neutron stars, and in particular her research focuses on reverberation mapping of neutron star X-ray binaries and the effect of super-Eddington accretion on pulse profiles.

Register here