The Composition of the Universe: the Evolution of Stars and Galaxies by Keranen Rachel;

Author:Keranen, Rachel; [Keranen, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC

Hubble was an ambitious astronomer and hoped to win the Nobel Prize for his paradigm-shifting discoveries about the universe beyond the Milky Way and its expansion. During his lifetime, however, the Nobel Prize in physics typically did not recognize accomplishments in astronomy. Hubble spent much of his later life working to include astronomy under the branch of physics, but the Nobel Prize Committee did not change their eligibility standards until shortly after Hubble’s death.

According to a stamp released by the United States Postal Service in 2008 to honor Hubble, “Often called a ‘pioneer of the distant stars,’ astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) played a pivotal role in deciphering the vast and complex nature of the universe ... Had he not died suddenly in 1953, Hubble would have won that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.”

FRITZ ZWICKY AND THE DUNKLE MATERIE

Fritz Zwicky was the first to point out the existence of dark matter, or dunkle materie, as he called it in a 1933 paper published in a German-Swiss journal. Zwicky was born in 1898 in Varna, Bulgaria, to a Swiss family. He was educated in Switzerland, where his father’s family originated, before moving to Pasadena, California, in 1925 to work at Caltech. He started as an assistant and eventually became Caltech’s first professor of astrophysics. It was an exciting time to be in Pasadena, which is near the Mount Wilson Observatory where Edwin Hubble was studying the universe with the Hooker Telescope.

Zwicky studied galaxies and theorized that if a star could bend the light of a more distant object, as Einstein predicted, a galaxy would bend that light even more. He argued that galaxies gathered in clusters, contrary to the popular belief at the time that galaxies were evenly distributed. Using the Coma Cluster of galaxies, he wrote that there must be dark matter to account for the rate of galaxies within the cluster.

Zwicky was also one of the first to hypothesize that some stars explode in very bright bursts that he and Mount Wilson astronomer Walter Baade called supernovas. Supernovas, they suggested, produced cosmic rays and very small, ultra-dense stars made of tightly packed neutrons. Their hypotheses were later proven to be correct. Zwicky accurately predicted the existence of a neutron star inside the Crab Nebula, which was the debris from a supernova explosion. Using a new telescope on Palomar Mountain, Zwicky discovered 122 supernovas in total, more than half of the supernovas known to exist at the time of his death.

Zwicky also worked on rocketry and propulsion systems during and post-World War II, for which he won the United States Medal of Freedom in 1949. Zwicky was an inventive worker and was awarded more than fifty patents, many related to rockets.

Zwicky is often remembered for insulting his colleagues, and it is thought that this limited the formal awards and historical acknowledgement he garnered for his work. Nevertheless, it is true that Zwicky was a pioneer in many areas of astronomy and astrophysics, especially around dark matter.

THE TECHNOLOGY USED TO STUDY DISTANT

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.