I am a professor at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. Some of my research interests are: extrasolar planets, instrumentation (with special focus on small telescopes), and variable phenomena on the sky. I have been the Principal Investigator of the HATNet extrasolar planet search, which has been running since 2003, using telescopes in Arizona and at Hawaii. With HATNet we discovered 70+ transiting exoplanets so far (called HAT-P-1b through HAT-P-70b). I am also the PI of the HATSouth project that runs telescopes at three sites in the Southern hemisphere (Chile, Namibia, Australia). With 24 telescopes gathering data round-the-clock the "Sun never rises in the HATSouth empire". With HATSouth, we have found over 70 transiting extrasolar planets, many of these were first of their kind. Recently I have been working on a new project, called HATPI, which will monitor the entire sky visible from Chile at high cadence, high photometric precision, and moderately good spatial resolution.
Previously I was at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
(Cambridge, MA) as an astrophycicist (2010-2011), National Science
Foundation Fellow (2007-2010), Hubble Fellow (2004-2007) and
Predoctoral Fellow (2001-2004). I received my PhD from Eötvös
University, Budapest in 2004. I did my undergraduate studies at Eötvös
University, majoring in physics, astronomy and English translation.
I am also a proud graduate of the Apáczai Csere János secondary school
in Budapest, where I took the specialized track in natural sciences.
I recently started a petition (EN) , (Hungarian) , (French) , (Italian) , (Spanish) , (Chinese) , for saving the night sky from low-earth orbit satellites, and limiting light pollution from space by upcoming satellite networks, such as SpaceX/starlink. Please consider signing and sharing this petition.For more information, see this link .
Below is my access information:
133 Peyton hall
4 Ivy lane
Princeton, NJ 08544 (USA)
Phone(office): 609-258-9926
gbakos at astro - dot - princeton - dot - edu
