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Steinn Sigurdsson

Steinn Sigurdsson — Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics — Faculty
Office: 426 Davey Laboratory
Address: 0525 Davey Laboratory University Park, PA 16802 US
sxs540@psu.edu
+1 814 863 6038
Steinn Sigurdsson
Astronomy Black Holes Multimessenger Astrophysics Neutrinos CMA

Steinn Sigurdsson is currently a Professor of Astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University at University Park. He did his doctorate in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He then worked as a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Institute of Astronomy and King’s College at Cambridge University in England. Steinn is a member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos and the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, and the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center. He works on a range of topics in astrophysics and related areas, ranging from cosmology, large scale dynamics and black holes, to formation and evolution of planets, and the prospects for discovering non-terrestrial life. He served as a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics and has been a member of the board of the Aspen Center for Physics since 2010.

Publications
  1. Peter Breiding, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, Michael Eracleous, Tamara Bogdanović, T. Lazio, Jessie Runnoe, Steinn Sigurdsson “The Search for Binary Supermassive Black Holes among Quasars with Offset Broad Lines Using the Very Long Baseline Array.” 914 1 (2021) doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abfa9a
  2. Khai Nguyen, Tamara Bogdanović, Jessie Runnoe, Stephen Taylor, Alberto Sesana, Michael Eracleous, Steinn Sigurdsson “Pulsar Timing Array Constraints on the Merger Timescale of Subparsec Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates.” 900 2 (2020) doi:10.3847/2041-8213/abb2ab
  3. Jason Wright, Steinn Sigurdsson “Advances in Precise Radial Velocimetry From Cross-Disciplinary Work in Heliophysics, Stellar Astronomy, and Instrumentation.” arXiv e-prints (2019)
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.