Allan Sandage
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| (96155) 1973 HA | 27 April 1973 |
Allan Rex Sandage (Born June 18 1926) is an American astronomer.
He was born in Iowa City, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1948. By 1953 he earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
Sandage began working at the Mount Palomar observatory. In 1958 he published the first good estimate for the Hubble parameter, namely 75 km/s/Mpc, which is quite close to today's accepted value. Later he became the chief advocate of an even lower value, around 50, corresponding to a Hubble age of around 20 billion years.
He performed spectral studies of globular clusters, and deduced that they had an age of at least 25 billion years. This led him to speculate that the universe did not merely expand, but actually expanded and contracted with a period of 80 billion years. The current cosmological estimates of the age of the universe, in contrast, are typically of the order of 14 billion years.
He is noted for the discovery in the M-82 galaxy of jets erupting from the core. These must have been caused by massive explosions in the core, and the evidence indicated the eruptions had been occurring for at least 1.5 million years.
Sandage was born of Jewish background, but at age 60 became a Christian. He responded to the question, "Can a person be a scientist and a Christian?", with "Yes. As I said before, the world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone." [link]
Honors
Awards- Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy (1957)
- Eddington Medal (1963)
- Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1967)
- National Medal of Science (1970)
- Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1972)
- Bruce Medal (1975)
- Crafoord Prize (1991)
- Asteroid 9963 Sandage
Further reading
- Alan P. Lightman and Roberta Brawer, Origins: the lives and worlds of modern cosmologists, Harvard University Press, 1990. Interviews with modern cosmologists, including Sandage.
- Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: the story of the scientific quest for the secret of the Universe, HarperCollins 1991, Back Bay (with new afterword), 1999. Very well-written historical account of modern cosmology told through the careers of the scientists involved, in which Sandage is the central character. Complementary to Origins.
External references
- Bruce Medalist page on [Sandage]
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