Faculty | Phyllis M. Lugger

Professor, Ph.D.
Astronomy, Harvard University, 1982.

Contact Information:

Department of Astronomy
Indiana University
Swain West 412
727 E. Third St.
Bloomington, IN  47405
voice: 812-855-6929, 6912, 6911
fax: 812-855-8725
email: lugger [at] astro.indiana.edu

Biographical Information:

Professor Lugger has been on the IU Astronomy faculty since 1984. She received an A. B. in Astronomy in 1976, an A. M. in Astronomy in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1982 from Harvard University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia before coming to IU. Professor Lugger typically teaches A105 (Stars and Galaxies) and A102 (Gravity, the Great Attractor: the Evolution of Planets, Stars, and Galaxies).

Research Interests:

Professor Lugger studies the dynamics of stellar systems (globular star clusters, interacting binary stars, galactic nuclei and clusters of galaxies). Professors Phyllis Lugger and Haldan Cohn  lead a research program in this area which includes both observational and theoretical investigations. Their research  uses the WIYN telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope the Chandra X-ray Observatory and a high performance GRAPE-6 N-body supercomputer at IU.  Current studies include:

• ChaMPlane survey: WIYN Hydra spectroscopy of galactic plane x-ray sources
• Globular Clusters: WIYN and HST studies of cluster structure and dynamics, HST and Chandra studies of binary x-ray sources in clusters
• GRAPE-6 N-body supercomputer simulations of the dynamical evolution of globular star clusters

Teaching: 

• Astronomy 105: Stars and Galaxies 
• Astronomy 102: Gravity, the Great Attractor: the Evolution of Planets, Stars and Galaxies

Research collaborators:

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:

Steve Cederbloom (Mount Union College), Robert Grabhorn , Paul Bode (Princeton University), Jim Dull (Albertson College of Idaho), Bob Berrington (University of Wyoming), Shawn Slavin (Purdue-Calmet), and Allen Rogel (Bowling Green State).

Current Ph.D. students:

Ted Maxwell and Nathalie Haurberg

Selected Publications:

• Chandra X-Ray Sources in the Collapsed-Core Globular Cluster M30 (NGC 7099)
  Lugger, P. M., Cohn, H. N., Heinke, C. O., Grindlay, J. E., & Edmonds, P. D. 2007, ApJ, 657, 286.
• The Global Kinematics of the Globular Cluster M92
  Drukier, G. A., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., Slavin, S. D., Berrington, R. C., & Murphy, B. W. 2007, AJ, 133, 1041.
• Faint X-Ray Sources in the Globular Cluster Terzan 5
  Heinke, C. O., Wijnands, R., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., Grindlay, J. E., Pooley, D., & Lewin, W. H. G. 2006, ApJ, 651, 1098.
• ChaMPlane Discovery of Candidate Symbiotic Binaries in Baade's and Stanek's Windows
  van den Berg, M., Grindlay, J., Laycock, S., Hong, J., Zhao, P., Koenig, X., Schlegel, E. M., Cohn, H., Lugger, P., Rich, R. M., Dupree, A. K., Smith, G. H., & Strader, J. 2006, ApJ, 647, L135.
• Three Years of ChaMPlane Northern Field WIYN Spectroscopy
  Rogel, A. B., Lugger, P. M., Cohn, H. N., Slavin, S. D., Grindlay, J. E., Zhao, P., & Hong, J. 2006, ApJS, 163, 160.
• Chandra Multiwavelength Plane (ChaMPlane) Survey: An Introduction
  Grindlay, J. E., Hong, J., Zhao, P., Laycock, S., van den Berg, M., Koenig, X., Schlegel, E. M., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., & Rogel, A. B. 2005, ApJ, 635, 920.
• A Deep Chandra Survey of the Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae: Catalog of Point Sources
  Heinke, C. O., Grindlay, J. E., Edmonds, P. D., Cohn, H. N., Lugger, P. M., Camilo, F., Bogdanov, S., & Freire, P. C. 2005, ApJ, 625, 796.