Allan Sandage
From Freepedia
| (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.
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 13 billion years.
He is most 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.
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)
Named after him
