Professor Maria Drout Named to the 2024 TIME100 Next List

The 2024 TIME 100 Next lineup was announced this week and among the individuals who are shaping the future of their fields was Associate Professor Maria Drout of the David A. Dunlap Department for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and associated faculty at the Dunlap Institute.

An expansion of the TIME100 list of the most influential people in the world, TIME100 Next highlights 100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future of business, entertainment, sports, politics, health, science and activism, and more. The full list and related tributes appear in the October 14, 2024 issue and are also online on the TIME100 Next website

Bethany Ludwig, Anna O’Grady, Maria Drout and Ylva Götberg.
Bethany Ludwig, Anna O’Grady, Maria Drout and Ylva Götberg, all authors of the paper describing the discovery, observing on the Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Photo: Ylva Götberg.

“I was honored (and quite frankly shocked) to be included on this year’s Time100 Next list,” says Drout. “It has been my great privilege to work with Ylva for the past 8 years and see both our careers and scientific ideas come to fruition.”

In collaboration with Assistant Professor Ylva Götberg of the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, Drout devised a strategy to search for and identify a strange type of star whose outer layers of hydrogen have been stripped away, likely by a companion star. What is left is a hot helium star, that despite having long been theorized to be fairly common, have been remarkably difficult to find. Until recently only one candidate had been identified.

Drout and Götberg combined their theoretical and observational chops to first come up with a detailed model to help guide their search, and then went out and looked for these strange objects using both telescopes on the ground and in space. Their search yielded hundreds of candidates for these types of helium stars, 25 of which they studied in detail.

This discovery is especially significant as these types of stars are thought to be the progenitors of neutron star mergers and a type of helium-poor supernova explosion. Their results were published in the journal Science last year, and you can read more about this work on the Dunlap Institute website.

“This recognition is so richly deserved,” says PhD candidate Bethany Ludwig, who was also a contributing author on this discovery. “Maria Drout and Ylva Götberg are not only incredible advisors but also brilliant scientists. Working with them has been both inspiring and rewarding, and I feel incredibly fortunate to witness their brilliance firsthand. I, and the rest of the stellar astrophysics community, cannot wait to see what groundbreaking discoveries they will undoubtedly make next.”