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In the early 1970s, the astrophysicist of Princeton University, Jeremiah Ostriker, was perplexed on the observations of the distant galaxies telescope. These rotating cosmic discs did not contain enough stars and other visible materials to keep them together. The answer, he made, must be that a much greater mass of “dark matter” not observed prevented them from flying next to it.
Although there have been scientific speculation about dark matter since the 1930s, Ostriker, who died at the age of 87, played an instrumental role in convincing the cosmologists that he really imbued the universe. Consensus is today that dark matter has a total cosmic mass six times that of ordinary matter – near the proportion calculated by Ostriker and his Princeton research group in a key article in 1974. But astrophysicists still have little idea of what invents dark matter.
With his broad and deeply interesting spirit, Ostriker worked in a productive way on a remarkable fan of problems through astrophysics, explains Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge, the astronomer-Royal in Great Britain, who knew him as ani and colleague: “He was interested in all the new subjects that were discussed and which were then part of the scientific consensus.”
Among other achievements, Ostriker has contributed significantly to progress in understanding how pulsars emit radiation, the vast volumes of space between stars, the role of cosmic gas clouds in the formation of galaxy and supernovas dynamics.
Jerry Ostriker, as he was generally known, was born in April 1937 into a Jewish family in New York. His mother taught in a public school and his father had a clothing company. In childhood, he was obsessed with science, bringing the metro back to a Broadway bookstore to buy Do you learn the calculation 13 years.
At Harvard University, Ostriker graduated in science but found more stimulating art, history and literature. “I remember thinking that the course I followed by the poet Archibald Macleish was the best training for the science that I followed at Harvard,” he wrote in a 2016 memory. His greatest personal success at the university was to marry Alicia Suskin, a first cycle at Brandeis University nearby who has become a award-winning poet as an award-winning Alicia.
On the other hand, he recalls, Harvard's astronomy course was “so bad … that I had to ask for the dean office to drop him after a mandate”. But Ostriker did not discourage astronomy as a subject and he continued to do a doctorate and postdoctoral research in astrophysics. In 1965, he became a lecturer in Princeton, who remained his main academic basis for the rest of his life, although he spent time in other universities, including a chair in Cambridge.
Unlike many academics, Ostriker was happy to devote time and energy to the administration, working for long periods as president of the department, then provost in Princeton.
Its key administrative contribution to astronomy was as a scientific leader and fundraising for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Operating since 1998 from a telescope dedicated to New Mexico, this provided the most complete card in the visible universe. Ostriker insisted on the fact that survey data should be freely available for astronomers around the world, which has led to 10,700 research articles, including a wide range of discoveries.
As an university provost, Ostriker has launched financial assistance initiatives “who have succeeded … to make Princeton much more attractive for a group of students much more diverse,” wrote his university colleagues in a testimony.
Ostriker underlined his personal commitment to promote diversity in his 2016 memories. When women were able to enter astronomy as full -fledged colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote: “Original achievements were immediate and enormous”.
It was therefore a moment of pride in 2012, the year he became a professor emeritus at Princeton, when the university appointed his daughter Eve professor of astrophysics. “Growing up, I don't think my father or myself had the expectation that I was going to” the family business “,” she said.
“What ended up attracting me in astrophysics with higher education is that I learned later, the same thing that attracted it 30 years earlier: the fact that the universe presents problems that can – at least in principle – be resolved,” she said. “What he liked the most was to discover a new confusing phenomenon, to find a range of ideas for what could explain it, then to work through everyone.”
