Derek B. Fox

Assistant Professor
Penn State University Astronomy & Astrophysics

My research interests are focused on multiwavelength follow-up observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). At Penn State I am pursuing this work in collaboration with the Swift Satellite Team and Peter Mészáros and his group. Off campus my collaborators include Shri Kulkarni, Fiona Harrison, and the GRB group at Caltech; Edo Berger and colleagues at the Princeton and Carnegie Observatories; and a diverse group of observers and theorists from around the world.

In my first year at Penn State, I led a team that helped solve the 35-year old mystery of the short-duration gamma-ray bursts by locating one such burst to a blue dwarf galaxy two billion light-years from Earth and observing its fading afterglow for almost a month with the Hubble Space Telescope. The resolution of this mystery caused significant excitement around the globe, and was the occasion for a NASA press conference in October 2005. I then coauthored a paper making use of these results to calculate, for the first time, the expected rate of gravity-wave detections from short bursts for the newly-operational Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

As a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, I adapted the Oschin 48-inch and Oscar Meyer 60-inch telescopes of Palomar Observatory to the task of rapid-response GRB observations. These facilities were used to discover three burst afterglows - GRB021004, GRB021211, and GRB040924 - at a very young age. The behavior of the GRB021004 afterglow, in particular, inspired a NASA press conference in March 2003. By moving quickly to observe and analyze the data from these and other facilities, I have discovered the afterglows of more than a dozen GRBs, and with colleagues at Caltech found the first three afterglows of X-ray Flashes (XRFs), and the first XRF redshift, z=0.251 for XRF020903.

I am a graduate of the astrophysics program within the MIT physics department. I received my Ph.D. in September 2000 with thesis advisor Professor Walter H. G. Lewin. Walter was recently the subject of a front-page story at the New York Times - his first-year physics course is one of the most popular courses on the Internet.

Teaching

Spring 2008: Astro 1, Section 4

Current Projects

Solving the Mystery of the Short-Hard Gamma-Ray Bursts (Hubble Space Telescope, Cycles 13 and 14, 54 orbits)
Spitzer Observations of the Highest-Redshift Gamma-Ray Bursts (Spitzer Space Telescope, Cycle 1, 46.8 hours)
Hobby-Eberly Telescope Observations of Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows (ongoing)
Gemini TOO Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (ongoing)
The Robotic Palomar 60-Inch Telescope, including an approved ground-based observations program for Cycle 1 of the Swift mission
The Caltech Core-Collapse Program, a Palomar Large Program for 2004B and 2005A (as Co-I)

Looking ahead, I have put forward a modest proposal to use 10% of the observing time of the Swift satellite over three years, 9.4 Msec in all, to make a complete survey of the 18,811 X-ray sources of the ROSAT Bright Source Catalog. This would provide an order-of-magnitude refinement in the two-dimensional positions of these sources and enable near-complete identification of their optical counterparts. This effort, in turn, should reveal the physical nature of these sources - which will include the nearest isolated neutron stars and quiescent X-ray binaries.

Curriculum Vitae
PDF or Postscript

Thesis
X-ray Observations of Globular Clusters, Low-Mass X-ray Binaries, and a Supernova, MIT Physics, September 2000

Selected Publications
I maintain my publications list dynamically via ADS - you may browse my full list of publications, or the refereed and astro-ph articles only. If you are after my most recent publications you may wish to search the ADS directly, although please note that there is some contamination (other D. Foxes) in this search.

On Gamma-Ray Bursts of various flavors:

Modeling GRB 050904: Autopsy of a Massive Stellar Explosion at z=6.29, L.-J. Gou, D. B. Fox, & P. Mészáros 2007, ApJ, 668, 1083
GRB 070610: A Curious Galactic Transient, M. M. Kasliwal et al. 2008, ApJ submitted
A novel explosive process is required for GRB 060614, A. Gal-Yam et al. 2006, Nature, 444, 1053
The Local Rate and the Progenitor Lifetimes of Short-Hard Gamma-Ray Bursts: Synthesis and Predictions for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory,, E. Nakar, A. Gal-Yam, & D. B. Fox 2006, ApJ, 650, 281
GRB fireball physics: Prompt and Early Emission, D. B. Fox & P. Mészáros 2006, NJPh, 8, 199
Relativistic ejecta from XRF 060218 and the rate of cosmic explosions, A. M. Soderberg et al. 2006, Nature, 442, 1014
The afterglow of GRB 050709 and the nature of short-hard gamma-ray bursts, D. B. Fox et al. 2005, Nature, 437, 845

On Supernovae and Novae:

An unusually brilliant transient in the galaxy M85, E. Ofek et al. 2007, Nature, 447, 458
On the progenitor of SN 2005gl and the Nature of Type IIn Supernovae, A. Gal-Yam et al. 2007, ApJ, 656, 372
A non-spherical core in the explosion of supernova SN 2004dj, D. C. Leonard et al. 2006, Nature, 440, 505
A high angular-resolution search for the progenitor of the type Ic supernova SN 2004gt, A. Gal-Yam et al. 2005, ApJL, 630, L29
Photometric Typing Analyses of Three Young Supernovae with the Robotic Palomar 60-Inch Telescope, A. M. Rajala et al. 2004, PASP, 117, 132

On Compact Objects:

Discovery of an Isolated Compact Object at High Galactic Latitude, Rutledge, Fox & Shevchuk 2008, ApJ in press
A ROSAT Bright Source Catalog Survey with the Swift Satellite, Derek B. Fox, 2004
Microsecond Timing of PSR B1821-24 with Chandra High Resolution Camera-S, R. E. Rutledge, D. W. Fox, S. R. Kulkarni, B. A. Jacoby, I. Cognard, D. C. Backer, & S. S. Murray, 2004, ApJ, 613, 522
A Limit on the Number of Isolated Neutron Stars Detected in the ROSAT Bright Source Catalogue, R. E. Rutledge, D. W. Fox, M. Bogosavljevic, & A. Mahabal, 2003, ApJ, 598, 458

Derek Fox (dfox [at] astro.psu.edu)

9 January 2008