Education
Sofia University.
Sofia University.
Among his primary research areas are the dynamics of star clusters, formation of stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets around such objects. Valentin Ivanov and Ray Jayawardhana are two of the pioneers of the investigation of the planemos, a special cast of exoplanets. They discovered the first double planemo Oph 162225-240515.
This discovery, came just before the debate about the 2006 planet definition, and posed the problem about the distinction between planets and low-mass stars (brown dwarfs) Ivanov was born in the town of Bourgas, Bulgaria in 1967.
He obtained his master"s degree in physics and astronomy at the University of Sofia in 1992. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States. in 2001.
He became a fellow at the European Southern Observatory, Cerro Paranal, and since 2003 he has been a staff astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, Paranal where he is instrument scientist for the wide-field near-infrared camera VIRCAM mounted at the Volunteers in Service to America (telescope). In 2006, together with Kiril Dobrev, he has published a science fiction story collection in Bulgarian.