Scott Jay Kenyon
| Scott Jay Kenyon | |
|---|---|
| Born | Scott J. Kenyon |
| Nationality |
 American |
| Fields |
Astrophysics: star formation and planetary formation |
| Institutions | Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory |
| Alma mater |
Arizona State University (1978) University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (1983) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ronald F. Webbink |
Scott Jay Kenyon (born 1956) is an American astrophysicist. His work has included advances in symbiotic and other types of interacting binary stars, the formation and evolution of stars, and the formation of planetary systems.
Kenyon received a B.S. in physics from Arizona State University in 1978 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1983. His doctoral dissertation is entitled The Physical Structure of the Symbiotic Stars and was expanded into a book, The Symbiotic Stars. After postdoctoral work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, including a CfA Fellowship, he joined the scientific staff at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Kenyon is a Fellow of the AAAS, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and is included in the Web of Knowledge index of highly cited researchers.
Kenyon has worked extensively on symbiotic binary stars. His book The Symbiotic Stars was the first to summarize observations and theories for these interacting binaries. The book reviews the general state of knowledge in this field c. 1984 and contains case histories of well-studied binaries and complete references to all papers published on symbiotic stars before c. 1984. With more than 350 citations, the book is a standard in the field.
Kenyon and Lee Hartmann first worked out detailed accretion disk models for pre–main sequence stars and applied these models to optical and infrared spectra of FU Orionis objects. Aside from explaining many details in the spectra of FUors, observations of the size of the disk in FU Orionis match model predictions. Observations of long-term variability in FUors also generally match model predictions. Kenyon and Hartmann used photometric observations and disk models to show that the disks of FUors are surrounded by infalling envelopes with a bipolar cavity. The bipolar cavity is a result of a wind from the disk, which interacts with the surrounding material to produce a bipolar outflow and (perhaps) a Herbig–Haro object,.
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