astronomy

Meg Urry

Meg Urry is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Meg Urry rather than just read about it. In short: Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University.

Key takeaways

Meg Urry belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Meg Urry to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Meg Urry from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University. Urry is known for establishing the unification paradigm for radio-loud active galactic nuclei, for her research on the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies, and for her advocacy for women and underrepresented groups in science.

Early life and education After growing up in Indiana and Massachusetts, Urry attended college at Tufts University, double-majoring in mathematics and physics, and graduating summa cum laude in 1977. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the N. Hobbs Knight Award for Physics. She became interested in astronomy during the summer of her junior year when she interned at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Urry earned an M.S. (1979) and a Ph.D. (1984) in physics from Johns Hopkins, where her advisor was Art Davidsen. For her dissertation, she studied blazars at Goddard Space Flight Center with Richard Mushotzky.

Career After finishing her Ph.D., Urry conducted a post-doctorate at M.I.T.'s Center for Space Research, working with Claude Canizares. This was followed by another post-doctorate at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), after which, in 1990, the Institute hired her as a full-time astronomer. At STScI she rose to the position of Head of the Science Program Selection Office. Urry joined Yale's faculty in 2001, at that time as the only woman in the department. She served as Chair of the Yale Physics Department from 2007 to 2013. From 2013 to 2017 she served in the Presidential line of the American Astronomical Society, from 2013-2014 as President-Elect, 2014-2016 as President, and 2016-2017 as Past President. In 2020 she was named one of the American Astronomical Society's inaugural class of fellows. She served from 2017-2023 on the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), the managing organization of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Urry has been active in addressing sex inequality in astronomy and science more generally, giving more than 60 talks on the topic, including at the annual Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP). With Laura Danly, Urry co-organized the first meeting of Women in Astronomy in 1992. This meeting produced the "Baltimore Charter," which was drafted by Sheila Tobias and eventually endorsed by the Council of the American Astronomical Society. Reducing the prevalence of sexual harassment in astronomy was also an area of focus for Urry during the time she was President of the American Astronomical Society. In 2010 she won the Women in Space Science Award from the Adler Planetarium, and in 2015 she won the Edward A. Bouchet Leadership award from Yale University.

Research Urry has published over 330 papers in refereed journals, including one of the most highly cited review papers in astronomy, and was identified as a Highly Cited Author by Thomson Reuters. Her research focuses on active galactic nuclei (AGN) — galaxies whose central supermassive black holes are actively accreting matter — and the co-evolution of black holes and their host galaxies over cosmic time. Urry's most influential contribution is establishing the unification paradigm for radio-loud AGN, demonstrating that apparently different classes — including blazars, radio galaxies, and quasars — are intrinsically the same type of object viewed at different orientations, with relativistic jets beamed toward the observer in the case of blazars. She used variability and spectral energy distribution analysis to probe the physics of relativistic jets and the demographics of blazars. Urry and her collaborators designed major multiwavelength surveys — including the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) and Stripe 82X — to quantify black hole growth over the past 12 billion years, establishing that roughly three-quarters of all accretion onto supermassive black holes is obscured by dust. Her group also showed that AGN host galaxies are predominantly disk-dominated rather than merger remnants, suggesting that most black hole accretion is not triggered by galaxy mergers. She and her research group participated in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate the growth of supermassive black holes. More recently, her group has developed machine learning techniques to study galaxy properties and to characterize spectral energy distributions.

Teaching and outreach In 2002, Urry created one of the first flipped classroom versions of introductory physics at Yale. She is the founding physics instructor for the Global Teaching Project, which provides Advanced Placement physics courses to high school students in underserved rural areas of Mississippi. Urry has taught at the program's summer residential sessions since 2017 and provides remote lectures during the academic year. She also writes about science for CNN.com.

Awards and honors N. Hobbs Knight Award for Physics, Tufts University, 1976, 1977 Phi Beta Kappa, 1976 Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy, 1990 Fellow, American Physical Society, 1999 Fellow, American Women in Science, 2006 Fellow, Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, 2007 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008 Women in Space Science Award, Adler Planetarium, 2010 George Van Biesbroeck Prize, American Astronomical Society, 2012 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2013 Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Medal, University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Edward A. Bouchet Leadership Award, Yale University, 2015 Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2016 Fellow, Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars Honorary doctorate, Tufts University Howard R. Lamar Faculty Award, Yale University, 2018 Fellow, American Astronomical Society, 2020 (inaugural class) Distinguished Career Prize, High Energy Astrophysics Division, American Astronomical Society, 2023 (inaugural recipient) Residency, Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation, 2023

Further reading Meg Urry, "Girls and the Future of Science", Huffington Post, July 19, 2011.

References

External links "Meg Urry" (faculty profile), Yale University Oral History Interview conducted July 1, 2020, American Institute of Physics "The Baltimore Charter for Women in Astronomy," Space Telescope Science Institute

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Meg Urry

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Meg Urry claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Meg Urry before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Meg Urry ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Meg Urry

In research: Meg Urry appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Meg Urry in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Meg Urry is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American astrophysicists, American women astronomers, Fellows of the American Physical Society, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Meg Urry outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Meg Urry in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Meg Urry means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Meg Urry out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Meg Urry in simple terms?

Why does Meg Urry matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Meg Urry?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Meg Urry.