Peter Scheuer (astronomer)

One Mile Telescope

Peter Scheuer (born March 31, 1930 in Frankfurt am Main , † January 21, 2001 in West Wickham , Cambridgeshire ) was a German-born British radio astronomer and theoretical astrophysicist.

Scheuer studied physics in Cambridge in particular with Martin Ryle and was in his radio astronomy group from 1951. In 1964 he built the One Mile Telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory . A characteristic was the extensive use of the inverse Fourier transformation for the evaluation, which was carried out with computers such as Titan, which only made the high resolution possible. The interferometric techniques developed for this purpose were one of the major scientific successes for which Ryle and Antony Hewish received the Nobel Prize in 1974. It was the first telescope that recorded images in the radio wave range with a resolution that exceeded that of the human eye. The name 1 mile came from the interferometer dimensions: it consisted of three radio antennas, each weighing 120 tons and with a screen diameter of 18 meters. Two were fixed, the third was moving on a half mile (800 m) railroad track. It was also able (for the first time) to compensate for the rotation of the earth. It was observed at 408 MHz and 1.2 GHz. From 1963 to 1992 he was Assistant Director of Research at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and Reader at Cambridge University. In 1992 he retired. From 1963 to 1971 he was a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge.

In the 1950s, Scheuer assisted Ryle in a media-effective discussion with the steady state theorists , who were particularly influential in Great Britain , since Ryle and Scheuer found arguments against the steady-state theory (homogeneous distribution) and for the bigbang theory when counting weak radio sources. Scheuer published about the methods used in 1957. Due to the fierce debate about the refutation of the steady state theory (in which the Ryle group in Great Britain was often hostile), the counting of the radio sources fell into disrepute and Scheuer, the 1954 to In 1956, who left Ryle's group (military service), had problems getting his work published. The work published in 1957 was part of his dissertation (Ph.D.)

In 1973 he and colleagues interpreted hot spots in radio galaxies as evidence of jets .

In 1974 he married Jane Morford and had a daughter with her.

Web links

• Oral History Interview, AIP 1971
• Science World, Eric Weisstein

Individual evidence

1. ^ John David North , Cosmos, pp. 648f
2. ^ Ryle, Scheuer, The spatial distribution and the nature of radio stars, Proc. Roy. Soc. A, Volume 230, 1955, p. 448, abstract
3. ↑ Scheuer, Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc., Volume 53, 1957, p. 764
4. ↑ Memoirs of Scheuer, Oral History Interview, AIP 1971