Lars Hernquist

Lars E. Hernquist (born December 14, 1954 in Princeton (New Jersey) ) is an American theoretical astronomer and astrophysicist. He is Mallinckrodt Professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics .

Hernquist, the son of the physicist Karl Gerhard Hernquist, studied at Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and received his doctorate in 1985 with Roger Blandford at Caltech . As a post-doctoral student he was at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1987 to 1990 and at Princeton University in 1990/91 . From 1991 he was Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the Lick Observatory of the University of California, Santa Cruz . Since 1998 he has been a professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

He is known for his studies of the dynamic development of galaxies and the explanation of the formation of their shapes from processes such as merging with other galaxies in the past. He simulates their development on supercomputers. An analytical model of the distribution of dark matter in galaxies (Herquist profile) is named after him. He also studies highly magnetized neutron stars and other compact objects.

From 1987 to 1990 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . He was a Sloan Research Fellow (1991–1993) and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and since 2008 a member of the National Academy of Sciences . For 2020 he received (together with Volker Springel ) the Gruber Prize for Cosmology .

Fonts

• An Analytical Model for Spherical Galaxies and Bulges, Astroph. J., Vol. 356, 1990, p. 359
• with Tiziana Di Matteo, Volker Springel : Energy input from quasars regulates the growth and activity of black holes and their host galaxies , Nature, Volume 433, 2005, pp. 604-607

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