Or Graur

Or Graur is a Senior Lecturer (assistant professor) in Astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. He received his PhD in Physics and Astronomy from Tel Aviv University, where he studied with Prof. Dan Maoz. He then went on to take postdoctoral positions at Johns Hopkins University (with Prof. Adam Riess) and New York University (with Prof. Maryam Modjaz) before taking an independent National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.  

Or first arrived at AMNH as a PhD student in 2011, where he was co-supervised by Dr. Michael M. Shara. He mentored 17 high-school students as part of the museum's Science Research Mentoring Program, served as the scientific editor of the astronomy Science Bulletins, and replied to emails sent in by the public to the Hayden Planetarium. Or remains a Research Associate of the museum's Department of Astrophysics.  

Or uses ground- and space-based telescopes to observe and study different types of transients - astrophysical phenomena that appear suddenly in the night sky and fade away over human timescales (weeks and months, rather than millions to billions of years). He is most interested in understanding what types of stars explode as different types of supernovae, and how to use tidal disruption events (bright flares emitted when super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies rip apart stars that stray too close) to study the physics of black holes. Or still gets a kick anytime he receives fresh images from the Hubble Space Telescope.