Valentin D. Ivanov

Valentin D. Ivanov is a renowned astronomer, working in the European Southern Observatory, mainly at the La Silla site. Among his primary research areas are the dynamics of star clusters, formation of stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets around such objects.

Together with Ray Jayawardhana is one of the pioneers of the investigation of the planemos, a special cast of exoplanets. Recently, they announced the discovery of the first double planemo Oph_162225-240515. This discovery, came just before the debate about the 2006 planet definition, and posed the problem about the distinction between planets and low-mass stars (brown dwarfs)

Background

Valentin D. Ivanov was born in the town of Bourgas, Bulgaria in 1967. He obtained his master degree in physics/astronomy at the University of Sofia in 1992. He earned a PhD degree at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A. in 2001. Then he was a fellow at the European Southern Observatory, Cerro Paranal, and since 2003 he is staff astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, Paranal where he is currently instrument scientist for the near-infrared camera and spectrograph ISAAC. In 2006, together with Kiril Dobrev, he has published a Science Fiction story collection in Bulgarian.

External links

* [http://eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/pr-29-06.html Twin planemos discovery - ESO outreach ]
* [http://www.sc.eso.org/~vivanov/ Personal homepage]
* [http://bgf.zavinagi.org/index.php/%D0%92%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD_%D0%98%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2 BG SF Wiki]