Reuven Ramaty

Reuven Ramaty (born February 25, 1937 in Timișoara , † April 8, 2001 in Silver Spring , Maryland , USA ) was a Romanian-born, Israeli physicist and astronomer who worked in the USA .

Life

Reuven Ramaty was born in the city of Timișoara in Romania . After the chaos of the war, he emigrated to Israel with his parents in 1948 , where he studied physics at Tel Aviv University . He taught physics in Tel Aviv for three years before going to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received his PhD in astrophysics in 1966 . The following year Ramaty joined the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA , where he has been for over 30 years worked, and one of the leading theorists. He headed the theory department from 1980 to 1993. Since 1983 he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland .

Reuven Ramaty is considered a pioneer in high-energy astrophysics . He had great influence in the physics of solar flares and cosmic rays as well as gamma-ray astronomy . Ramaty became particularly well known for his prediction of an interstellar gamma ray emission line at 1809 MeV , which stems from the decay of a supernova and was actually detected in 1982.

Ramaty was chairman of the department of high energy astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1983-1985) and chairman of the department of astrophysics of the American Physical Society (1986-1989). In 1975 he received the Senior US Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and in 1980 the Lindsay Award for his results in gamma-ray astronomy; he was awarded the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal by NASA in 1982. In 1975 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The HESSI project co-initiated by Reuven Ramaty was renamed Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager in 2002 in his honor .

Web links

• Publications by R. Ramaty in the Astrophysics Data System
• Obituary by Richard E. Lingenfelter, bibcode : 2001BAAS ... 33.1579W (English)
• Reuven Ramaty Papers (English)