Anne Cowley | |
|---|---|
 Anne Cowley at the 138th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), Michigan State University | |
| Alma mater | Wellesley College University of Michigan |
| Known for | Spectroscopic observations of stars and stellar black holes |
| Spouse | Charles R. Cowley |
| Awards | Alumnae Achievement Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Chicago University of Michigan Arizona State University |
Anne Pyne Cowley is an American astronomer known for her spectroscopic observations of stars and stellar black holes, including the 1983 discovery of a likely black hole in LMC X-3, an X-ray binary star system in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This became the first known extragalactic stellar black hole,[1][2] and the second known stellar black hole after Cygnus X-1.[2] She is a professor emerita at Arizona State University.[3]
Cowley is a 1959 graduate of Wellesley College, where she became interested in astronomy after taking a general education course on the subject. She went to the University of Michigan for graduate study in astronomy, earned a Ph.D. there, and met her eventual husband, astronomer Charles R. Cowley.[1]
She continued as a researcher at the University of Chicago until 1967, when she returned to the University of Michigan as a research scientist. In 1983, she took a professorship at Arizona State University.[1]
In 1986, Wellesley College gave Cowley their Alumnae Achievement Award.[1] She was named a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.[4][5]
