The Famous Bulgarians: Prof. Dimitar Sasselov
Forget about Pluto, there’s a new kid on the solar system block
Dimitar Sasselov comes from a long line of accomplished individuals responsible for substantial contributions to different fields of science and life in general. His father, Dimitar Sasselov, was an architect – possibly the reason he decided to pursue a career in science and his grandfather… Dimitar Sasselov… was a famous historian and author of numerous works on the Bulgars. As you can see, they were way too occupied with science and important stuff, that ain’t nobody had time to come up with different names, so they were all named after each other.
At only 19, Dimitar Sasselov (the atronomer) published his first article in an international scientific publication, thanks to which he was invited to study in Toronto, Canada. In 1998 he was officially invited to become a lecturer in the Astronomy Department at Harvard. He has participated in several NASA missions and written two books on the pulsations of stars.
What earns him international fame, however, is the discovery him and his team make using the Kepler telescope. They discover hundreds of planets very similar to Earth – a discovery that could change life as we know it! Using the same method, he also discovered the most distant planet in our galaxy, located around 5000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It is called Ogle-TR-56b. Probably gets bullied a lot with that name…
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