RIP:Allan Sandage: Astronomer widely acknowledged as among the most outstanding of the 20th century

[n2doc]

By Martin Childs
Monday, 22 November 2010

'You weren't anybody if Sandage hadn't stopped talking to you at one time or another,' a science writer said of him

Allan Sandage, widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential astro-nomers of the 20th century, played an integral part in increasing our understanding of the scale of the universe and determining the Hubble Constant, which describes the universe's expansion.

Sandage, a self-described "hick who fell off the turnip truck", was a prolific writer and researcher whose work covered the evolution and behaviour of stars, the birth of the Milky Way, the age of the universe and the discovery of the first quasar, in addition to his crucial work on the Hubble constant.

He pursued the latter with his long-standing Swiss collaborator, Gustav Tammann of the University of Basel. This lifelong quest brought him into conflict with many in the space community who believed the pair had overestimated the distances to other galaxies – a crucial part of the equation for the constant – making the universe appear bigger and older than it really was. The universe, they said, was really about 10 billion years old.

An only child, Allan Rex Sandage was born in 1926, in Iowa City, Iowa. His father was a professor of business studies while his mother ran the home. As a boy Sandage enjoyed watching the Ohio skies through a friend's telescope. When his father gave him his own telescope he began keeping a journal of sunspot activity.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/allan-sandage-astronomer-widely-acknowledged-as-among-the-most-outstanding-of-the-20th-century-2140189.html

[shireen]

1. we lost some great ones recently.

Besides Sandage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huchra">John Huchra passed away a few weeks ago. And we lost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_G._Marsden">lost Brian Marsden.

RIP ....