Angela Olinto

Angela Villela Olinto (born July 19, 1961) is an American astroparticle physicist. Among her many honors, she was elected in 2001 a Fellow of the American Physical Society and 2021 in a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Quotes

• Being a woman is hard ... The expectations are that we’ll be gorgeous, completely organized, great mothers, great wives, and great professionals ... The pressures are huge. I was always expected to bring the cookies to meetings because I’m a woman. Like, men can’t find cookies? That’s why I say: Let’s be nicer to ourselves.
  Diversity is very important ... When you bring in new folks who ask new questions, you change the field and the basic sciences. Women want to do great research. But we’re asking, ‘Why do we have this rule? That artificial hierarchy?’ We can be more collaborative.
  And I’ll tell you this ... When men suggest we speak with deeper voices if we want to get our message across, here is what I say: Gravity does not care how deep your voice is.
  • Angela V. Olinto. Lincoln Road Enterprises.

• Strange matter is quark matter that is assumed to be absolutely stable. A seed of strange matter in a neutron star will convert the star into a strange star. The speed at which this conversion occurs is calculated. The calculation takes into account the rate at which the down- and strange-quark Fermi seas equilibrate via weak interactions and the diffusion of strange quarks towards the conversion front. The speed is found as a function of the temperature of the star and the minimum strangeness necessary for strange matter stability. The conversion can be detected as an energy release of ∼58 MeV with different luminosities for different stages of a neutron star's evolution and as a “super-glitch” on pulsars' frequencies.
  • (25 June 1987) "On the conversion of neutron stars into strange stars". Physics Letters B 192: 71–75. DOI:10.1016/0370-2693(87)91144-0.

• Scientists are very curious ... We might be curious about something that looks completely irrelevant, and it turns out to be a really amazing thing. Or it could be irrelevant. We don't know. If we knew, we wouldn't be looking at it.
  • as quoted by Delia O'Hara, Angela Olinto's cosmic needle in a haystack. American Association for the Advancement of Science (aaas.org) (12 June 2013).

• I was really interested in the basic workings of nature: Why three families of quarks? What is the unified theory of everything? But I realized how many easier questions we have in astrophysics: that you could actually take a lifetime and go answer them. Graduate school at MIT showed me the way to astrophysics — how it can be an amazing route to many questions, including how the universe looks, how it functions, and even particle physics questions. I didn’t plan to study ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays; but every step it was, “OK, it looks promising.”
  • as quoted by Natalie Wolchover, (April 27, 2017) "A Cosmic-Ray Hunter Takes to the Sky. Angela Olinto’s new balloon experiment takes her one step closer to the unknown source of the most energetic particles in the universe.". Quanta Magazine.

• The Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) was designed as a NASA Astrophysics probe-class mission to identify the sources of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and observe cosmic neutrinos from extremely energetic transient sources. POEMMA consists of two identical spacecraft flying in a loose formation at 525 km altitude oriented to view a common atmospheric volume and to provide full-sky coverage for both types of messengers. Each spacecraft hosts a wide field of view Schmidt telescope with a hybrid focal plane optimized to observe both the UV fluorescence signal from extensive air showers (EASs) and the optical Cherenkov signals from EASs.
  • (2023) . "POEMMA (Probe of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics) Roadmap Update". arXiv:2309.14561 [astro-ph.HE]. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2309.14561. (journal reference: Proceedings of the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference, PoS (ICRC2023) 1159, held in 2023 in Nagoya, Japan)

External links

• * Biographical Sketch: Dr. Angela V. Olinto. U.S. Congress (congress.gov).
• Meet Angela Olinto, Columbia's New Provost. Columbia News, Columbia University in the City of New York (April 2024).