Alan Dressler

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Alan Michael Dressler (born March 23, 1948 in Cincinnati ) is an American astronomer.

Dressler graduated from the University of California, Berkeley , with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1970 and received a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz , in 1976 . As a post-doctoral student , he was at the Hale Observatory until 1981 . From 1981 he was at the Carnegie Institution for Science at their Palomar Observatory and Las Campanas Observatory . In 1988/89 he was Associate Director of Carnegie Observatories.

He deals with the birth and evolution of galaxies and cosmology. He was a leading member of the Morphs Collaboration (with Gus Oemler, also from Carnegie Observatories), which studied the evolution of galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas. They found that elliptical galaxies were the oldest, formed from collisions in the early universe. The star formation in them was completed about 2 to 3 billion after the Big Bang and then happened especially in spiral galaxies. According to the Morph Collaboration, lens-shaped galaxies (which occupy a middle position between spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies, with spiral arms, but little gas and star formation), on the other hand, arise especially in galaxy clusters from the interaction of spiral galaxies that fall in the direction of the galaxy-rich center of the cluster. The work will be continued in the ICBS (IMACS Cluster Building Survey). She uses the IMACS (Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph) spectrograph built under the direction of Dressler at the Baade Telescope of the Magellan Observatory.

Dressler is also pursuing a project to search for the first galaxies and to clarify whether their radiation was sufficient to explain the observed reionization of the universe a billion years after the Big Bang.

In 1987 he was one of the discoverers of the Great Attractor , about which he wrote a book.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and, since 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He received the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize for Astronomy in 1983 and the NASA Public Service Medal in 1999 .

Fonts

  • Journey to the Great Attractor. Exploring the galaxies. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996
  • Galaxy morphology in rich clusters: Implications for the formation and evolution of galaxies, Astrophys. J., Volume 236, 1980, pp. 351-365

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Dressler, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dressler, Alan Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Cincinnati