David Merritt

For the American football player, see David Merritt (American football).

David Merritt is an American astrophysicist and professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. He received his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. His fields of specialization include dynamics and evolution of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and computational astrophysics.

David Merritt is a former Chair of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society. He is a founding member of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation at RIT.

His scientific contributions include Osipkov-Merritt models,^[1] black hole spin flips,^[2] the Leonard-Merritt mass estimator,^[3] the M_BH-σ relation,^[4] stellar systems with negative temperatures,^[5] and rotational Brownian motion.^[6]

With Rainer Spurzem he designed and built gravitySimulator, a novel supercomputer for solving the gravitational N-body problem.

References

1. ^ Merritt, D. (1985). "Spherical Stellar Systems with Spheroidal Velocity Distributions". The Astronomical Journal, 90, 1027-1037.
2. ^ Merritt, D. and Ekers, R. (2002). "Tracing Black Hole Mergers through Radio Lobe Morphology". Science, 297, 1310.
3. ^ Leonard, P. and Merritt, D. (1989). "The Mass of the Open Star Cluster M35 as Derived from Proper Motions". The Astronomical Journal, 339, 195-208.
4. ^ Ferrarese, F. and Merritt, D. (2000). "A Fundamental Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies". The Astrophysical Journal, 539, L9-L12.
5. ^ Merritt, D., Tremaine, S. and Johnstone, D. (1989). "Models of Violently Relaxed Galaxies". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 236, 829-841.
6. ^ Merritt, D. (2002). "Rotational Brownian Motion of a Massive Binary". The Astrophysical Journal, 568, 998-1003.

Books by David Merritt

• Merritt, D. (ed.) (1989). Dynamics of Dense Stellar Systems. 251 pages. Cambridge University Press.
• Merritt, D. (ed.) (1999). Galaxy Dynamics. 164 pages. Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Popular Articles by David Merritt

• Ferrarese, L. and Merritt, D. (2002). Supermassive Black Holes. Physics World, June 2002, p. 41.

External links

• David Merritt's homepage

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