Peter Kosec

Peter received his MSci degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2016. During his undergraduate studies, he participated in several summer internship programmes during which he began working in X-ray Astronomy, first focusing on the physics of hot gas in Galaxy Clusters and later on the physics of obscured Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).

Peter’s Master’s project focused on studying the X-ray timing properties of a highly variable nearby AGN. He continued with PhD studies at the University of Cambridge. During his PhD he studied accretion disc winds in various accreting systems using high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy, under the supervision of Prof Andrew Fabian and Dr Ciro Pinto. Initially he focused on the so-called Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs), a class of highly accreting stellar-mass accretors in nearby galaxies, and detected the first evidence for a disc wind in a ULX powered by a neutron star. In the second part of his PhD program, he studied the physics of ionised outflows in several highly accreting supermassive black holes (Narrow Line Seyfert I class). Finally, he worked on the famous neutron star X-ray binary Hercules X-1 in the X-ray spectrum of which he detected time variable ionised absorption from a disc wind. Towards the end of his PhD, he became the PI of a large observational campaign on Hercules X-1 with XMM-Newton to study the physics and energetics of its variable wind. Peter joined the HETG team at MIT in January 2021 under the supervision of Dr David Huenemoerder and Prof Erin Kara.