Hyron Spinrad facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Hyron Spinrad
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| Born | February 17, 1934  |
| Died | December 7, 2015 Walnut Creek |
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Hyron Spinrad (born February 17, 1934 – died December 7, 2015) was an American astronomer. He studied many things in space. His work included looking at the air around planets and how galaxies change over time.
From 2010 until his death in 2015, he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an "emeritus" professor, which means he had retired but still kept his title.
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About Hyron Spinrad
Hyron Spinrad was born in New York in 1934. His family later moved to California. There, he studied astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.
After college, he joined the United States Army. He worked for the Army Map Service, which creates maps. After two years, he went back to Berkeley for graduate school in 1957.
He earned his Ph.D. in 1961. His main study was about the groups of stars found in the centers of galaxies. After finishing his Ph.D., he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Here, he used a method called spectroscopy to study planets and other objects in our Solar System.
In 1964, Spinrad was invited to return to Berkeley. He became a professor there. He received "tenure" in 1968, which meant he had a permanent teaching position. He passed away on December 7, 2015.
Spinrad's Space Discoveries
Hyron Spinrad explored many different areas in astronomy. He studied what stars are made of. He also looked at how galaxies form and change. Another big part of his work was studying the air around planets and comets in our Solar System.
He mainly used a method called spectroscopy in his research. This involves looking at the light from space objects. It helps scientists learn what those objects are made of and how they are moving.
How Galaxies Change Over Time
To understand how galaxies form, Spinrad looked for very distant galaxies. When we look at something far away in space, we are actually looking back in time. This is because light takes a very long time to travel across space to Earth. So, the light we see from a distant galaxy shows us what it looked like millions or even billions of years ago.
Spinrad first found distant galaxies by looking at objects in the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources. This list included many radio galaxies that he thought would be very far away. He was right!
In 1975, Spinrad found the galaxy with the highest "redshift" known at the time. Redshift means that light from a distant object is stretched out as the universe expands. The more stretched the light, the farther away the object is. He then found even more galaxies with greater redshifts. This included the first galaxy ever found with a redshift larger than z = 1.
These discoveries helped scientists understand how galaxies have changed throughout the universe's history. For example, his work showed that there were hundreds of times more bright radio galaxies about 7 billion years ago than there are today.
Studying Planets in Our Solar System
While at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Spinrad spent a lot of time studying the atmospheres of planets in our Solar System.
He made an important discovery about Mars. He found water vapor in its atmosphere. He also figured out how much carbon dioxide was in Mars' atmosphere. From this, he and his team learned that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth.
Awards and Honors
Hyron Spinrad received several important honors for his work:
- An Asteroid named 3207 Spinrad was discovered in 1981 and named after him.
- He won the Heineman Prize in 1986. This award is given for outstanding work in astrophysics.
- He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. This is a very high honor for scientists in the United States.
