Spacetime Coordinates: Gibor Basri | GP Interview #15

This is the fifteenth in a series of written interviews with thinkers, artists, activists and other luminaries around the world, people whose life’s work resonates with our founding principles.

Our friend Gibor Basri is an astrophysicist and researcher on the faculty at UC Berkeley and was the first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion there. He was one of the discoverers of brown dwarf stars, and has authored 200 papers with nearly 30,000 citations.

Gibor has a casual and exuberant way of speaking about our cosmos, and he’s good at explaining such phenomena to laypeople (he was given the Sagan award in 2016). Spend enough time with him and you get some sense of our connection to activity at cosmic scales and will inevitably land in a state of awe.

GP: As an astrophysicist, you were the first to discover and characterize brown dwarf stars. What’s so interesting and exceptional about this type of star?

These are the “missing link” between stars and planets. The most massive planet (13X Jupiter) is nearly 6X smaller than the least massive star.

We couldn’t think of a reason why Nature would not make objects in between, but in the early 1990s still none had been found. I used the newly built Keck Telescope (still one of…