A Wayne State University researcher has been awarded a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award, the agency's most prestigious award for up-and-coming researchers in science and engineering. The five-year, $550,000 grant was awarded to Ed Cackett, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, for the project "Reflection and reverberation in neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries." According to Cackett, neutron stars are extreme stars - about the mass of the sun, but only the size of a city - containing ultra-dense material, many times the density of an atomic nucleus. "These stars are so dense that the velocity needed to escape a neutron star's gravity is about 30 percent of the speed of light," said Cackett.

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