Background
Toomre, Alar was born on February 5, 1937 in Rakvere, Estonia. Son of Elmar and Linda (Aghen) Toomre. came to the United States, 1949, naturalized, 1955.
Toomre, Alar was born on February 5, 1937 in Rakvere, Estonia. Son of Elmar and Linda (Aghen) Toomre. came to the United States, 1949, naturalized, 1955.
He received an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering and Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957 and then studied at the University of Manchester on a Marshall Scholarship where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in fluid mechanics. Toomre returned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach after completing his Doctor of Philosophy and remained there for two years.
He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Toomre"s research is focused on the dynamics of galaxies. Toomre emigrated to the United States with his family in 1949.
After spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies, he returned again to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of the faculty, where he stayed.
Toomre was appointed an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965, and Professor in 1970. In 1964, Toomre devised a local gravitational stability criterion for differentially rotating disks.
lieutenant is known as the Toomre stability criterion, which is usually measured by a parameter denoted as Q. The Q parameter measures the relative importance of vorticity and internal velocity dispersion (large values of which stabilise) versus the disk surface density (large values of which destabilise). The parameter is constructed so that Q<1 implies instability.
Toomre collaborated with Peter Goldreich in 1969 on the subject of polar wander, developing the theory of polar wander.
Whether true polar wander has been observed on earth, or apparent polar wander is accountable for all the observations of paleomagnetism remains a controversial issue. Although the small number of particles in the simulations obscured many processes in galactic collisions, Toomre and Toomre were able to identify tidal tails in his simulations, similar to those seen in the Antennae Galaxies and the Mice. The brothers attempted to reproduce specific galaxy mergers in their simulations, and it was their reproduction of the Antennae galaxies that gave them the greatest pleasure.
In 1977 Toomre suggested that elliptical galaxies are the remnants of the major mergers of spiral galaxies.
He further showed that based on the local galaxy merger rate, over a Hubble time the observed number of elliptical galaxies are produced if the universe begins with only spiral galaxies. This idea remained controversial and widely debated for some time.
From this work, the Toomre brothers identified the process of collision evolution as the Toomre sequence. The sequence begins with two well separated spiral galaxies and follows them through collisional disruption until they settle into a single elliptical galaxy.
Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science. Member American Astronomical Society (Dirk Brouwer award 1993), International Astronomical Union, American Academy Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences.
Married Joyce Stetson, June 15, 1958. Children— Lars, Erik, Anya.