Péter I. Mészáros
The Pennsylvania State University
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Primary Section: 12, Astronomy Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
Péter Mészáros is a theoretical astrophysicist best known for his work in cosmology, gamma-ray bursts and neutrino astrophysics. He was born in Hungary and raised in Belgium and Argentina, receiving an M.S. in Physics from the National University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Cambridge Universities, and a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He joined the faculty of Pennsylvania State University in 1983, where he is the Eberly Chair Professor Emeritus of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics, and Director Emeritus of the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics. He served as head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1993-2003, and as theory lead of the NASA Swift satellite consortium. He has held visiting appointments at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (U.C. Santa Barbara), Cambridge University, California Institute of Technology, Fermi National Laboratory, and was Einstein Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
Mészáros' main research interests are high energy astrophysics, cosmology and particle astrophysics. He identified physics in the early Universe which determine the scale-dependence of large structures, such as galaxies and clusters (known as the Mészáros effect). He introduced processes crucial in advection-dominated flows. He contributed to the study of the interstellar medium and magnetized neutron stars, as detailed in the monograph "High Energy Radiation Processes in Neutron Stars" (1992). He predicted that gamma-ray bursts would exhibit X-ray and optical afterglows, formulating a model through which observations of burst afterglows are interpreted, work recognized with the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society (2000). He contributed broadly to the study of multimessenger signals (cosmic rays, neutrinos, gravitational waves and gamma-rays) from cosmic sources, as described in the monograph "The High Energy Universe (2010). His current work centers on the study of theoretical models of the sources and the production mechanisms of such signals, in particular to explain the origin of the observed high energy neutrino and cosmic ray diffuse backgrounds, and their relation to the observed gamma-ray and lower energy radiation flux from individual astrophysical sources.
