Pieter C. van der Kruit
Stay at the IAC: 23/03/2013 to 20/04/2013.
Research line: Galactic Formation and Evolution
Prof. dr P.C. van der Kruit is currently the Jacobus C. Kapteyn Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
After a PhD at Leiden University under the supervision of Professor Jan Oort, he has held positions at Leiden, at the Carnegie Institution, and at Groningen, and has been a visiting scientist at Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, Canberra, Australia , the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, the STScI in Baltimore, USA, ESO, Santiago, Chile, and Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, U.S.A. He has been a member or chair of many national and international committees, including Chair of the ESO Council, and Chair of the ALMA Board and of the European ALMA Board. He is also a member and vice-chairman of the Advanced Grants Review Panel for Universe Sciences of the European Research Council (ERC) .
His scientific interests are wide but focus on the structure of disk galaxies, in particular their outer structure. He co-discovered truncations of disks, indicated by sharp downward changes of slope in the surface brightness profiles of edge-on galaxies.
During his visit, he worked with Ignacio Trujillo and Johan Knapen and their teams on an analysis of surface brightness profiles of face-on galaxies using images from the IAC Stripe-82 release. These images are among the deepest ever obtained for this kind of galaxies, and allowed us to find, for the first time ever, truncations in face-on galaxies. In most galaxies, however, truncations could not be observed because they are 'outshone' by the halo component. The observations of these haloes allowed to place constraints on the origin and evolution of galaxies. This work is in preparation to be published by Peters et al. (2014). In addition to this, Professor van der Kruit discussed many science and policy topics with IAC staff and students, and worked on his bibliography of Kapteyn.
