Halton Arp

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Arp 2008

Halton Christian Arp (born March 21, 1927 in New York , † December 28, 2013 in Munich ) was an American astronomer .

life and work

Arp studied at Harvard University (BA, 1949) with Harlow Shapley (surveyor of the Milky Way ) and went to Los Angeles to study at CalTech (Ph.D., 1953) with Edwin Hubble . He then became a research fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1953, doing research at the Mount Wilson Observatory and the Palomar Observatory .

In 1955 he became a research assistant at Indiana University and in 1957 an employee of the Mount Palomar Observatory, where he worked for 29 years.

Arp became known for the controversial theory, according to which the redshift especially of quasars has a previously unknown non-cosmological cause and is therefore not suitable for determining the distance. In doing so, he challenged one of the foundations of the Big Bang theory . He also represented an alternative theory of gravity in the sense of Le Sage gravitation .

Although Arp received a lot of criticism for his theory, his consistency was also praised. This is how the former head of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics , Rudolf Kippenhahn , said of Arp:

"We need people like him, otherwise there is a danger that cliques will form in science that do not allow criticism from outside."

When Halton Arp fell out of favor at the Palomar Observatory, Kippenhahn, who headed the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching near Munich in the 1980s, brought him to Munich on a scholarship. From 1983 Halton Arp was listed as an unpaid visiting scientist at the MPA. Since 1996 he was an external member of the Academia Europaea .

Arp also compiled a catalog of unusual galaxies , the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies .

Awards

literature

  • Dennis Overbye: The echo of the big bang. Core questions of modern cosmology . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1991. ISBN 978-3-426-26267-2 .
  • Halton C. Arp: The continuous cosmos. Past and future of the universe . Mannheim Forum 1992/93.

Web links

Commons : Halton Arp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

References

  1. ↑ Big-bang-defying giant of astronomy passes away
  2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from December 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Membership directory: Halton Arp. Academia Europaea, accessed June 18, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Arp, Halton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arp, Halton Christian (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 2013
Place of death Munich