Background
Salpeter, Edwin Ernest was born on December 3, 1924 in Vienna, Austria. Son of Jakob L. and Frieder (Horn) Salpeter. came to the United States, 1949, naturalized, 1953.
Astronomer astrophysicist physicist university professor
Salpeter, Edwin Ernest was born on December 3, 1924 in Vienna, Austria. Son of Jakob L. and Frieder (Horn) Salpeter. came to the United States, 1949, naturalized, 1953.
He attended Sydney Boys High School (1939-1940) and Sydney University, where he obtained his bachelor"s degree in 1944 and his master"s degree in 1945. In the same year he was awarded an overseas scholarship and attended Birmingham University, England, where he earned his doctorate in 1948 under the supervision of Sir Rudolf Peierls.
Born to a Jewish family, he emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens to escape the Nazis. He spent the remainder of his career at Cornell University, where he was most recently the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences, Emeritus. Salpeter died of leukemia at his home in Ithaca on November 26, 2008.
In 1951 Salpeter suggested that stars could burn helium-4 into carbon-12 with the Triple-alpha process not directly, but through an intermediate metastable state of beryllium-8, which helped to explain the carbon production in stars.
He later derived the initial mass function for the formation rates of stars of different mass in the Galaxy. Salpeter wrote with Hans Bethe two articles in 1951 which introduced the equation bearing their names, the Bethe–Salpeter equation which describes the interactions between a pair of fundamental particles under a quantum field theory.
In 1964 Salpeter and independently Yakov B. Zel"dovich were the first to suggest that accretion discs around massive black holes are responsible for the huge amounts of energy radiated by quasars (which are the brightest active galactic nuclei). This is currently the most accepted explanation for the physical origin of active galactic nuclei and the associated extragalactic relativistic jets.
Member AURA board, 1970-1972. Member NAS, American Astronomical Society (vice president 1971-1973), American Philosophical Society, American Academy Arts and Sciences, The Royal Society (foreign), Australian Academy Science, Deutsche Akademie Leopoldina.
Married Miriam Mark, June 11, 1950. Children— Judy Gail, Shelley Ruth.