Scienceעידית זהבי

Idit Zehavi

Idit Zehavi is an Israeli astrophysicist known for her work on the expansion of the universe and galaxy clustering in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

born 1969Anomaly in cosmic expansionSloan Digital Sky Survey researchGalaxy clustering studies

Occupation: astronomer, researcher, astrophysicist, physicist
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Idit Zehavi was born in 1969 in Israel

Idit Zehavi was born in Israel in 1969. She studied in Jerusalem and earned a PhD from the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998.

In 1998, with Avishai Dekel, she found an anomaly suggesting that the region around Earth expands faster than the universe as a whole. Adam Riess of the University of California, Berkeley noted the same finding independently.

She then moved to the United States for postdoctoral work on galaxy clustering at the University of Chicago and research at Fermilab. In 2004 she moved to the University of Arizona and kept working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In 2005 she took part in research led by Daniel Eisenstein that detected cosmic ripples.

In 2006 she joined the astronomy department of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as an associate professor. In 2009 she received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to extend her galaxy clustering work with the survey.