Paul Kalas (born August 13, 1967) is a Greek American astronomer known for his discoveries of debris disks around stars. Kalas led a team of scientists to obtain the first visible-light images of an extrasolar planet with orbital motion around the star Fomalhaut, at a distance of 25 light years from Earth. The planet is referred to as Fomalhaut b.
Background Kalas was born in New York City to George Kavallinis and Maria Drettakis, who immigrated to the United States from Heraklion, Crete. Kalas attended Detroit Country Day School in Michigan, and studied astronomy and physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Astronomy in 1996 from the University of Hawaiʻi under the direction of astronomer David C. Jewitt.
Kalas worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, he became an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kalas lives with his wife Aspasia Gkika and daughters Maria-Nikoleta and Natalia near Berkeley, California.
Discoveries Kalas discovered several circumstellar disks using a coronagraph on the Hubble Space Telescope and at the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. In 1995 he discovered various forms of asymmetric structures in optical images of the Beta Pictoris disk. He was the lead scientist for the first optical images of debris disks surrounding the nearby red dwarf AU Microscopii and the bright star Fomalhaut.
Kalas's Hubble Space Telescope image of Fomalhaut revealed a narrow belt of dusty material analogous to our Solar System's Kuiper Belt. However, Kalas also found that Fomalhaut's belt is narrow and geometrically offset from the star by 15 astronomical units. These features are considered strong evidence for an extrasolar planet orbiting Fomalhaut that gravitationally sculpts the morphology of the belt.
+ Circumstellar disks discovered: 5 AU Microscopii October 14, 2003 Fomalhaut May 17, 2004 HD 15115 July 17, 2006 HD 53143 September 11, 2004 HD 139664 October 14, 2004
Honors Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2014) AIAA William H. Pickering Lecture (2010) Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009)
Selected publications Articles
Books
References
External links The Circumstellar Disk Learning Site Kalas's homepage Sky & Telescope Article on Fomalhaut discovery Space.com article on AU Microscopii discovery New Scientist article on HD 53143 and HD 139664 discoveries