Biography

Wil van Breugel has more 25 years of experience in conducting astronomical research using a wide variety of telescopes on earth and in space. He obtained his PhD at Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands, where he discovered that some galaxies exhibit strong radio emission which is powered by jets emanating from massive black holes at their centers (`radio galaxies'). After his PhD he held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. During that time he used the Kitt Peak 2.1-m and 4-m and Steward 2.5-m telescopes, as well as the world's most powerful radio imaging telescope, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico. By combining radio and optical observations he found that radio jets often interact violently with gas clouds in the interstellar medium of their parent galaxies. Shocks from jet/cloud collisions heat up and entrain this previously invisible, cold gas. The heated gas can be observed on large telescopes using special filters.

After his postdoctoral years Wil became a research astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley. In collaboration with astronomy graduate students he used the Lick Observatory 3-m telescope for a systematic study of the optical properties of radio galaxies. This resulted in the discovery that the optical and radio emission from radio galaxies are closely aligned due to outflow from the jets and radiation from hidden, active black holes (`quasars') interacting with surrounding material. This interaction might in some cases even trigger star formation along the path of the jets.

Approximately 12 years ago Wil joined LLNL as a research astronomer at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He is now using the world's largest optical, twin 10-m telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study the formation and evolution of the most massive galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the early Universe.