Paul Groot - Homepage

Astrophysics Nijmegen

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

Paul Groot is full professor of astrophysics and head of the Department of Astrophysics of the Radboud University Nijmegen . My area of research is white dwarf binaries (in Dutch), especially concentrating on their evolution and space densities. For this we use telescopes around the world, primarily those at The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes and at the European Southern Observatory .

To search for new white dwarf binaries we use wide field surveys such as the Faint Sky Variability Survey , the Sloan Digital Sky Survey , the IPHAS survey of the Galactic plane in H-alpha and its blue complement, the UVEX survey. The last two are using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma and are an UK, NL, Spain collaboration. The UVEX survey is led by me. In the near future we will be observing with the Omegacam camera at the VST.

I am the Dutch Co-PI and Project Scientist for the X-Shooter spectrograph for the ESO Very Large Telescope. X-Shooter is a high efficiency, medium resolution (R=5000), echelle spectrograph that covers the wavelength range from 3000 Angstrom to 2.5 micron simultaneously. The Dutch contribution to X-Shooter is the near-infrared arm including the cryostat which will be built at the TechnoCenter of the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Nijmegen. In May 2009 X-Shooter was successfully installed on the VLT telescope. Guaranteed time observations will begin in October 2009.