Simon David Manton White | |
|---|---|
 Simon White speaking at the 2012National Astronomy Meeting of theRoyal Astronomical Society | |
| Born | Simon David Manton White (1951-09-30)30 September 1951 (age 74) |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Cambridge University of Toronto |
| Known for | Cosmological structure formation |
| Spouse | Guinevere Kauffmann |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | Helen B. Warner Prize (1986) Heineman Prize (2005) Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2006) Brouwer Award (2008) Max Born Prize (2010) Gruber Cosmology Prize (2011) Shaw Prize (2017) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics andcosmology |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley University of Arizona University of Cambridge Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics |
| Thesis | The Clustering of Galaxies[1] (1977) |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald Lynden-Bell |
| Doctoral students | Hans-Walter Rix Guinevere Kauffmann Amina Helmi Volker Springel Mark Vogelsberger |
Simon David Manton White (born 30 September 1951),FRS, is a British-German astrophysicist. He was one of directors at theMax Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019.[2]
White studiedmathematics atJesus College, Cambridge inthe University of Cambridge (B.A. 1972) andAstronomy at theUniversity of Toronto (MSc 1974). In 1977 he obtained a doctorate in Astronomy underDonald Lynden-Bell entitled "The Clustering of Galaxies" at theUniversity of Cambridge. After a few years at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, theSteward Observatory of theUniversity of Arizona andthe University of Cambridge he was appointed in 1994 as a Scientific Member of theMax Planck Society and as director of theMax Planck Institute for Astrophysics inGarching. White has also been research professor at theUniversity of Arizona (1992), guest professor at theUniversity of Durham (1995), honorary professor at theLudwig-Maximilians University in Munich (1994) and at the Astronomical Observatories of Shanghai (SHAO) (1999) and Beijing (BAO) (2001). White lives in Munich with his wife, the astrophysicistGuinevere Kauffmann. They have one son.[3] In 2016, the day after the Brexit vote, White filed papers to obtain German citizenship.[4]
White has worked primarily on the formation of structure in the Universe. He is known for his contributionsto our understanding of galaxy formation and for his role in helping to establish the viability of thecurrent standard model for the evolution of cosmic structure, the so-calledΛCDM model.
Already at the time of his doctoral work he studied the influence ofDark Matter on the growth of structure and in 1978 he andMartin Rees argued that the properties of galaxies can be understood if theyform by gravitationally driven condensation of gas at the centres of extended dark matter halos as these grow steadily in mass through accretion and merging.[5] This has been the basic paradigm for galaxy formation ever since.
In later years White developed computer models which allowed the growth of galaxies and galaxy clustering tobe simulated directly in order to allow quantitative comparison of theoretical models with astronomicalobservations. His 1983 work withMarc Davis andCarlos Frenk demonstrated that the dark matter could not be made of massive neutrinos, at the time the only known elementary particles which were considered possible candidates.[6] Their subsequent work together withGeorge Efstathiou was particularlyinfluential in establishing that a universe dominated by Cold Dark Matter (a new kind of elementary particle of unknown type) could produce large-scale structurein the galaxy distribution which does closely resemble that observed.[7] A more recent large project wastheMillennium Simulation, carried out in Garching in 2005 as part of the work of a large internationalcollaboration, theVirgo Consortium. At the time, this was the largestN-body simulation ever carried out, with 10 billion N-body particles representing the dark matter distribution, and using simplified physical recipes to follow the formation and evolution of more than 20,000,000 galaxies throughout a cubic region more than 2 billion light-years on a side.[8]
Work by White has addressed issues of stellar dynamics, of the detailed structureof galaxies and their dark halos, of the processes controlling galaxy formation, of the structure and evolution of galaxy clusters, of the formation of elliptical galaxies through galaxy mergers, and of the statistics of galaxy clustering. Papers includethose withJulio Navarro andCarlos Frenk on the "universal" structure of dark matter halos.[9] TheNavarro–Frenk–White profile is named after them, and the 1996 and 1997 papers in which they systematically used cosmologicalN-body simulations to explore its properties are currently White's highest impact theoretical work (with more than 21,000 citations according toGoogle Scholar). This is because these two papers demonstrated that the characteristic size and density of dark matter halos are tightly related to their mass in a way which depends on, and so can be used to measure, important properties of our universe as a whole, for example, its material content and its spatial curvature, as well as the properties of the initial conditions from which all cosmic structure has grown.
White's more than 500 publications in the refereed professional literature have been cited more than 281,000 times by other scientists (status end-2024 according toGoogle Scholar).
