Meet the Curator Assistant Curator, Division of Physical
Sciences Dr. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary
scientist: he studies planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.
This nascent field is so young that much of the work involves
developing the techniques needed to see these planets, so that
their light can be dissected and analyzed. His optics laboratory
in the Rose Center is the birthplace of a number of new
astronomical instruments designed to tackle this problem. In
March 2004, Dr. Oppenheimer deployed the world's most sensitive
coronagraph at the AEOS Telescope in Maui. He designed and built
this coronagraph in his AMNH lab. See lyot.org for more
information. Dr. Oppenheimer also works on faint white dwarfs,
the remnants of normal stars, and brown dwarfs, star-like
objects that are too small to be stars but too large to be
called planets. He is the co-discoverer of the first brown
dwarf, called Gliese 229B, and was the first scientist to study
the atmospheric composition, chemistry and physics o