Tuesday, October 15, 2024

The 2024 TIME 100 Next List includes Maria Drout, a 2010 graduate of the University of Iowa who earned a Bachelor's Degree in Physics and Astronomy. 

Drout is currently an associate professor in the David A. Dunlap Department for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

An expansion of the TIME100 list of the most influential people in the world, TIME100 Next highlights 100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future of business, entertainment, sports, politics, health, science and activism, and more. The full list in the October 14, 2024 issue is available on time.com/next; see this tribute to Drout's work

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Ylva Gotberg and Maria Drout Time 100 Next
Ylva Gotberg and Maria Drout, Courtesy Leona Schwarz—Institute of Science and Technology Austria; Courtesy Tom Holoien/Maria Drout

In collaboration with Assistant Professor Ylva Götberg of the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, Drout devised a strategy to search for and identify a strange type of star whose outer layers of hydrogen have been stripped away, likely by a companion star. What is left is a hot helium star, that despite having long been theorized to be fairly common, have been remarkably difficult to find. Until recently only one candidate had been identified.

“I was honored (and quite frankly shocked) to be included on this year’s Time100 Next list,” says Drout. “It has been my great privilege to work with Ylva for the past eight years and see both our careers and scientific ideas come to fruition.”

Drout and Götberg combined their theoretical and observational chops to first come up with a detailed model to help guide their search, and then went out and looked for these strange objects using both telescopes on the ground and in space. Their search yielded hundreds of candidates for these types of helium stars, 25 of which they studied in detail.

This discovery is especially significant as these types of stars are thought to be the progenitors of neutron star mergers and a type of helium-poor supernova explosion. Their results were published in the journal Science.

While at the UI, Drout was a research assistant for Prof. Cornelia Lang and earned several honors including Churchill and Goldwater Scholarships, James Van Allen Award, and the University of Iowa Ernest R. Johnson Memorial Prize, awarded to graduating student with the highest academic standing. 

Opens in a third party websitelast year, and you can read more about this work in a previous post.

Adapted from an article by Ilana MacDonald, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto