Victoria Kaspi is an astrophysicist who studies pulsars and other neutron stars. Victoria has discovered many new pulsars and her research has advanced our understanding of the structure of magnetars — neutron stars with an extremely powerful magnetic field.
Left behind when a massive star explodes, neutron stars can help us to understand what happens during this supernova process. Using the most powerful radio and X-ray telescopes in the world, Victoria observes these relatively tiny, yet dense, stellar remnants as they rotate, emitting bursts of radiation.
Victoria has won many awards, including the 2007 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics and the 2010 NSERC John C. Polanyi Award. In 2013, Victoria’s McGill University research team attracted media attention when they published a paper in the journal Nature describing a phenomenon they term ‘anti-glitch’. She believes that this slowing down of electromagnetic emissions indicates internal fluid movement within an X-ray pulsar.
Subject groups
- Astronomy and physics
Astronomy, Astrophysics, Gravitation
- Other
Science policy
Awards
Bakerian Medal and Lecture
Her research focused on neutron stars and their utility for constraining basic physics. More recently, she has also made fundamental discoveries on Fast Radio Bursts.
UK-Canada Rutherford Lecture
On 'The cosmic gift of neutron stars'.
