 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Jesse L. Greenstein" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(October 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Jesse L. Greenstein | |
|---|---|
| Born | Jesse Leonard Greenstein (1909-10-15)October 15, 1909 |
| Died | October 21, 2002(2002-10-21) (aged 93) |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Awards | California Scientist of the Year (1964) Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1970) Bruce Medal (1971) Petrie Prize Lecture (1971) NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (1974) Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1975) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Yerkes Observatory Caltech |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald H. Menzel |
Jesse Leonard Greenstein (October 15, 1909 – October 21, 2002) was an Americanastronomer.[1] His parents were Maurice G. and Leah Feingold.
He earned a Ph.D, with thesis advisorDonald H. Menzel, fromHarvard University in 1937, having started there at age 16.[2] Before leaving Harvard, Greenstein was involved in a project withFred Lawrence Whipple to explainKarl Jansky's discovery ofradio waves from theMilky Way and to propose a source.[3] He began his professional career atYerkes Observatory underOtto Struve and later went toCaltech. WithLouis G. Henyey he invented a newspectrograph and awide-field camera. He directed the Caltech astronomy program until 1972 and later did classified work on militaryreconnaissance satellites.
WithLeverett Davis, Jr, he demonstrated in 1949 that the magnetic field in our galaxy is aligned with the spiral arms. His theoretical work with Davis was based on the conclusion just reached byWilliam A. Hiltner that the recently detected polarization of starlight was due to dichroic extinction by interstellar dust grains aligned with the ambient magnetic field.
For the 1965 bookGalactic Structure, edited byBlaauw andSchmidt, Greenstein wrote an important chapter on subluminousblue stars.[4]
Greenstein did important work in determining the abundances of theelements in stars, and was, withMaarten Schmidt, among the first to recognizequasars as compact, very distant sources as bright as a galaxy. The spectra of the first quasars discovered, radio sources3C 48 and3C 273, were displaced so far to the red due to theirredshifts as to be almost unrecognizable, but Greenstein deciphered 3C 48 shortly before Schmidt, his colleague at theHale Observatories worked out the spectrum of 3C 273.
Awards
Named after him
