Faculty | Haldan N. Cohn
Emeritus Professor
Ph.D., Astrophysics, Princeton University, 1979.
Contact Information:
Department of Astronomy
Indiana University
Swain West 412
727 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
Phone: (812) 855-4174
Email: cohn [at] astro.indiana.edu
Biographical Information:
Professor Haldan Cohn has been on the IU Astronomy
faculty since 1983. He received an A.B. in Physics from Harvard University in 1975 and a Ph.D. in
Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1979. Professor Cohn held
postdoctoral positions at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois before
coming to IU. He most recently taught A100 (Introduction to the
Solar System), A105 (Stars and Galaxies), A451 (Stellar Astrophysics), and A570 (Galactic Dynamics).
Research Interests:
Professor Cohn's research centers on the dynamics of stellar systems, including interacting
binary stars, star clusters, the Milky Way Galaxy, galactic nuclei, and clusters of galaxies.
Professors Haldan Cohn and Phyllis Lugger
lead a research program in these areas which includes both theoretical and observational components.
The theoretical studies use high-performance computers at IU.
The observational studies make substantial use of the
WIYN telescope, the
Hubble Space Telescope, and the
Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Their principal research collaborators include
Josh Grindlay (Harvard University),
Charles Bailyn and Gordon Drukier (Yale University),
Adrienne Cool (San Francisco State University),
and Brian Murphy (Butler University).
Former Ph.D. students include Larry David (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Brian Murphy,
Steve Cederbloom (Mount Union College), Robert Grabhorn, Paul Bode (Princeton University),
Jim Dull (Albertson College of Idaho), Bob Berrington (Ball State),
Shawn Slavin (Purdue-Calmet) and Allen Rogel (Bowling Green State).
Following are some of our current research projects.
- The ChaMPlane Survey: Identification of Chandra X-ray sources in the Galactic plane using WIYN
- Detection and Identification of Chandra X-ray sources in the collapsed-core globular cluster M30
- Analysis of the Chandra X-ray source spatial distributions in normal and collapsed-core globular clusters
- Simulation of star cluster evolution with the GRAPE-6 N-body Supercomputer at Indiana University
- Study of the global dynamics of globular clusters using WIYN
Selected Publications
- Identifications of faint Chandra sources in the globular cluster M3
Zhao, Y., Heinke, C. O., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., Cool, A. M. 2019, MNRAS, 483, 4560. - The radius of the quiescent neutron star in the globular cluster M13
Shaw, A. W., Heinke, C. O., Steiner, A. W., Campana, S., Cohn, H. N., Ho, W. C. G., Lugger, P. M., Servillat, M. 2018, MNRAS, 476, 4713. - New cataclysmic variables and other exotic binaries in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae*
Rivera Sandoval, L. E., van den Berg, M., Heinke, C. O., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., Anderson, J., Cool, A. M., Edmonds, P. D., Wijnands, R., Ivanova, N., Grindlay, J. E. 2018, MNRAS, 475, 4841. - Identification of Faint Chandra X-Ray Sources in the Core-collapsed Globular Cluster NGC 6752
Lugger, P. M., Cohn, H., Cool, A. M., Heinke, C. O., Anderson, J. 2017, ApJ, 841, 53. - Anisotropic Fokker-Planck Models for the Evolution of Globular Star Clusters: The Core-Halo Connection
Drukier, G. A., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., Yong, H. 1999, ApJ, 518, 233.
