Mark Henriksen

Mark HenriksenContact Information

henrikse@umbc.edu
410-455-1980
Physics, Rm 414

Henriksen Astrophysics Group

Title

Associate Professor

Education

Ph.D., Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, 1985
M.M., Music, Catholic University of America, 2001
B.S., Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977

Honors and Awards

UCLA Honors College
NASA Graduate Student Research Fellowship
NASA Group Achievement Award: Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph Team
NSF Early Career Award

Previous Experience

Before coming to UMBC in 1999, I was an associate professor at the University of North Dakota and visiting assistant professor at UCLA. After graduate school, I was a post-doc at the Space Telescope Science Institute and worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Professional Interests

My research field of interest is high energy astrophysics. In particular, I study the formation of large scale structure in the Universe: galaxy clusters, superclusters, and filaments. Structure formation involves energetic collisions of massive objects that produce a ~100 million Kelvin plasma as well as relativistic protons and electrons. These in turn produce a characteristic X-ray signature that I use to study the physics of structure formation.

Publications

Mark Henriksen’s publications and citations.

X-ray map of a galaxy cluster showing a 5-million-light-year-long, comet-shaped gas cloud. The dense head is in the lower right, with a broad tail fanning out toward the upper left. A scale bar at the bottom indicates the massive astronomical size.
This X-ray image shows a comet-like blob of gas about five million light-years long hurtling through a distant galaxy cluster at over 500 miles per second (nearly 1,000 km/s). The comet is confined to the orange regions in this image. The head is the lower right, with reddish areas. The tail fans outward because there is less pressure to confine it.