Edwin Ernest Salpeter

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Edwin Ernest Salpeter (born December 3, 1924) is an Austrian-Australian-American astrophysicist. He emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens. He received his PhD from Birmingham University in 1948, under supervision of Sir Rudolf Peierls, since when he has been at Cornell University. He is currently the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences, Emeritus.

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[edit] Scientific contributions

In 1951 Salpeter suggested that stars could burn helium into carbon with the Triple-alpha process. 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 [1] 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 [2].

[edit] Honors

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Suzy Collin, Quasars and Galactic Nuclei, a Half-Century Agitated Story, 2006, preprint on arXiv.org
  2. ^ Peterson, B. M. An Introduction to Active Galactic Nuclei. 1.ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
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