Hyron Spinrad (February 17, 1934 – December 7, 2015) was an Americanastronomer. His research has ranged from the study ofplanetatmospheres to the evolution ofgalaxies. From 2010 until his death in late 2015 he was anemeritus professor ofastronomy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.
Spinrad was born in New York in 1934.[1] After his family moved toCalifornia, he received aBachelor of Arts in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Following graduation, he enrolled in theUnited States Army, and began work in theArmy Map Service.[2] After two years in the Army, he applied to and was accepted to the graduate program at Berkeley in 1957. He earned hisPh.D. in 1961, writing his thesis on stellar populations in galactic nuclei.[3][4] He then took a position as a research scientist at theJet Propulsion Laboratory, where he performedspectroscopic studies ofSolar Systemplanets and smaller bodies. In 1964 Spinrad was invited to return to Berkeley as a professor, and in 1968 he received tenure.[2][4] He died December 7, 2015.[5][6]
Spinrad pursued research in a variety of areas of astronomy, including stellar composition, the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the composition of the atmospheres ofSolar Systemplanets andcomets. These diverse topics are united in that Spinrad primarily relied upon measurements ofspectral lines (spectroscopy) in his work.[7]
To study the formation of galaxies, Spinrad looked for distant galaxies. The more distant an object, the longer it takes light to reachEarth as a result of thespeed of light being finite. In general, this allows astronomers to study objects as they were many millions or even billions of years ago. Spinrad originally selected targets by looking at the position of members of theThird Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources, as the catalogue included manyradio galaxies that he thought would be at high redshift.[7] The search was successful, and Spinrad found the galaxy with the highest identifiedredshift in 1975, and then found several more with greater redshifts, including the first identification of a galaxy with a redshift larger thanz = 1.[7][8][9] These discoveries helped show how galaxies have evolved throughout the history of the universe. For example, by measuring redshifts of sources in the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources, it was possible to establish the number of such bright radio galaxies per volume in the universe as a function of its age, and find that there were hundreds as times as many radio galaxies atz 1 as there are today.[9]
Spinrad spent much of his time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking at the atmospheres of Solar System planets. He discoveredwater vapor in the atmosphere ofMars,[10] and derived the abundance ofcarbon dioxide in Mars' atmosphere, from which he and his collaborators inferred that Mars has an atmosphere very much more tenuous than Earth's.[7][11]
