Keivan Stassun
Stevenson Professor of Physics | Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, UNITED STATES
Expert in the search for Earth-like planets across the galaxy and an advocate for diversity, including neurodiversity, in the academy.
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Areas of Expertise (1)
Astronomical Phenomena
Accomplishments (5)
Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math, and Engineering Mentoring (professional)
2018
HHMI Professor (professional)
2018
AAAS Mentor of the Year (professional)
2018
Research Corporation for Science Advancement SEED Award (professional)
2017
Research Corporation for Science Advancement TREE Award (professional)
2015
Education (3)
University of Wisconsin-Madison: Hubble Postdoc, Astronomy 2003
University of Wisconsin-Madison: Ph.D, Astronomy 2000
UC Berkeley: B.A., Physics 1994
Links (3)
Selected Media Appearances (10)
First images from NASA’s James Webb Telescope will be shared with researchers and students in Middle Tennessee
WPLN radio
2022-07-12
Dr. Keivan Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University, is helping lead that effort. He and his team will analyze these new images for revelations about space and time in distant galaxies.
NASA Needs 'Multi-generational Commitment' for Space Mission DEI: Report
Newsweek online
2022-05-18
Keivan Stassun, one of the study's co-authors and the Stevenson Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University's College of Arts & Science, added in a Vanderbilt news release that SMD's current process can "systematically disadvantage and exclude folks of certain backgrounds or life experiences who could be superb, arguably even more capable, leaders."
Fix the system, not the students
Science online
2022-03-02
Even before the TEAM-UP report, some academic physicists had begun to take similar steps. At Vanderbilt University, astrophysicist Keivan Stassun was moved to act by data showing Black undergraduates are being pushed out of the field they want to study.
NASA’s biggest telescope is about to launch, and a Vanderbilt astronomer has a ‘front row seat’ to cosmic discovery
WPLN radio
2021-12-23
“The James Webb Telescope is by far, by a country mile, the single most ambitious and technologically-advanced thing that human beings have sent into space,” said Dr. Keivan Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University.
Recruiting for talent on the autism spectrum
CBS 60 Minutes tv
2021-07-18
Dan Burger's unique abilities caught the attention of Keivan Stassun, an astrophysics professor at Vanderbilt. His son is on the autism spectrum, and Stassun helped start the Frist Center.
Revealed: The ‘Next Hubble’ Space Telescope That Will Photograph Another Earth, Cost $11 Billion And Launch In The 2040s
Forbes online
2021-11-04
The plans involve a new flagship space telescope, but rather than selecting one of the four proposals on offer the report has opted for a mix of two of them. “We did not want to say what mission concept we like best, but instead we wanted to say what we need to achieve,” said Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University and one of the members of the steering committee for this report.
“Six Light-Years Away”–TESS Exoplanet Team Will Observe 400,000 Stars
The Daily Galaxy online
2019-03-26
“This is a remarkable time in human history and a huge leap for our understanding of our place in the universe,” said astronomer Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University, a member of the TESS science team that will observe 400,000 stars across the whole sky to catch a glimpse of an exoplanet transiting across the face of its star. The stars selected are bright, cool dwarfs, with temperatures roughly between 2,700 and 5,000 degrees Kelvin. The closest are only approximately 6 light-years from Earth.
Super hot planet bigger than Jupiter might be disappearing
CNET online
2017-06-05
"KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet," Vanderbilt's Keivan Stassun said in a release. "Or, if gas giant planets like KELT-9b possess solid rocky cores as some theories suggest, the planet may be boiled down to a barren rock, like Mercury." The team has published a paper describing the planet in the journal Nature and is also presenting it this week at a meeting of American Astronomical Society in Austin.
Flawed Data Just Made That 'Alien Megastructure' Even More Unlikely
Gizmodo online
2016-05-09
“Whenever you are doing archival research that combines information from a number of different sources, there are bound to be data precision limits that you must take into account,” explained study co-author Keivan Stassun in a statement. “In this case, we looked at variations in the brightness of a number of comparable stars in the DASCH database and found that many of them experienced a similar drop in intensity in the 1960’s. That indicates the drops were caused by changes in the instrumentation not by changes in the stars’ brightness.”
A Graduate Program Works To Diversify The Science World
NPR online
2014-01-02
"For too long we've thought about diversity as this problem sort of after the fact," says Keivan Stassun, an astronomy professor at Vanderbilt University. Stassun helped found the Bridge Program — a partnership between Vanderbilt and nearby Fisk, a historically black university — which was created in 2004 with the goal of increasing the numbers of women and underrepresented minority students earning Ph.D.s in science. "In reality," Stassun says, "the diversity is there, and we've been seriously filtering it out. And we've been filtering it out on the basis of things that are not actually predictive of who's going to succeed and who's going to fail." Those things are, mostly, GRE scores and GPA.
Selected Articles (3)
Radius Inflation at Low Rossby Number in the Hyades Cluster
The Astrophysical JournalKarl Jaehnig, Garrett Somers, Keivan G Stassun
2019 Radius inflation continues to be explored as a peculiar occurrence among magnetically active, low-mass stars. Recently, Somers & Stassun showed that radius inflation among low-mass stars in the young open cluster M45 (Pleiades Cluster) is correlated to the rotation rate: faster rotators are more inflated.
On the Gaia DR2 distances for Galactic luminous blue variables
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical SocietyNathan Smith, Mojgan Aghakhanloo, Jeremiah W Murphy, Maria R Drout, Keivan G Stassun, Jose H Groh
2019 We examine parallaxes and distances for Galactic luminous blue variables (LBVs) in the Gaia second data release (DR2). The sample includes 11 LBVs and 14 LBV candidates. For about half of the sample, DR2 distances are either similar to commonly adopted literature values, or the DR2 values have large uncertainties.
TOI-150: A transiting hot Jupiter in the TESS southern CVZ
The Astrophysical Journal LettersCaleb I Cañas, Gudmundur Stefansson, Andrew J Monson, Johanna K Teske, Chad F Bender, Suvrath Mahadevan, Conny Aerts, Rachael L Beaton, R Paul Butler, Kevin R Covey, Jeffrey D Crane, Nathan De Lee, Matias R Diaz, Scott W Fleming, DA Garcia-Hernandez, Fred R Hearty, Juna A Kollmeier, Steven R Majewski, Christian Nitschelm, Donald P Schneider, Stephen A Shectman, Keivan G Stassun, Andrew Tkachenko, Sharon X Wang, Songhu Wang, John C Wilson, Robert F Wilson
2019 We report the detection of a hot Jupiter (${M}_{p}={1.75}_{-0.17}^{+0.14}\,{M}_{{\rm{J}}}$, R p = 1.38 ± 0.04 R J) orbiting a middle-aged star ($\mathrm{log}g={4.152}_{-0.043}^{+0.030}$) in the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) southern continuous viewing zone (β = −79fdg59).
