As a CO-investigator and full member of the science team on the neutron star interior composition explorer (nicer) NASA mission, DR. Bogdanov will actively contribute to the legacy science program…

This contract award to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York is a $214,253 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to support Dr. Slavko Bogdanov's participation as a co-investigator on the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission. Under this award, Dr. Bogdanov will continue contributing to the mission's legacy science program through the Light Curve Modeling Working Group, including data analysis, target selection, and publication of results related to constraining the neutron star mass-radius relation. The grant will also fund a postdoctoral fellow to assist with data processing, analysis tool development, and inference work supporting NICER's goal of precisely measuring the radii of several neutron stars. This award does not have a set-aside designation and is in support of NASA's astrophysics research priorities.

As a CO-investigator and full member of the science team on the neutron star interior composition explorer (nicer) NASA mission, DR. Bogdanov will actively contribute to the legacy science program of the extended nicer mission, as described in its approved 2019 NASA astrophysics senior review proposal, through continued participation in the existing topical science working groups. The proposed postdoctoral fellow, who will join DR. Bogdanov s research group, is expected to participate in a number of the team research activities described below. As a member and chair of the light curve modeling working group, s. Bogdanov is currently involved and will continue to be involved in all efforts within this group during the legacy science program. This includes the ongoing reduction and analysis of nicer data collected for the top millisecond pulsars selected as targets for constraints on the neutron star mass-radius relation and the dense matter equation of state. DR. Bogdanov will continue with assessment and selection of new targets suitable for light curve modeling, writing of internal documentation and memoranda, and publication of nicer science results related to the measurement of the mass-radius relation of neutron STARS. The postdoctoral fellow will be tasked with conducting portions of the data processing and reduction, developing new and improving existing analysis tools, and carrying out some of the inference analyses on the reduced nicer data. The activities within this working group are aimed at ensuring that nicer achieves the goal of constraining the radii of several neutron STARS to a precision of 5%. Ultimately, we will use these measurements to make valuable inferences regarding the equation of state of cold supra-nuclear matter, which remains one of the principal outstanding problems in modern physics.