John Peter Huchra (/ˈhʌkrə/HUK-rə; December 23, 1948 – October 8, 2010[1]) was an Americanastronomer andprofessor. He was the ViceProvost for Research Policy atHarvard University and a Professor ofAstronomy at theCenter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.[2] He was also a former chair of the United States National Committee for theInternational Astronomical Union.[2] and past president of theAmerican Astronomical Society.[3][4]
Huchra was born on December 23, 1948, inJersey City, New Jersey, to a father who was a train conductor and a mother who was a housewife. He was raised inRidgefield Park, New Jersey and graduated fromRidgefield Park High School as part of the class of 1966.[5] He developed an interest in reading books about cosmology and science fiction. He was a member of the wrestling team at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1970 with a major inphysics. He went on to theCalifornia Institute of Technology, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in astronomy. He took on a postdoctoral fellowship at theCenter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in 1976 and remained there for the rest of his career.[6]
Together with fellow astronomersMarc Aaronson andJeremy Mould, Huchra announced that based on their analysis of the brightness and rotational speed of certainspiral galaxies that the universe was nine billion years old, half the age that most astronomers had previously thought.[6]
In 1986,Valérie de Lapparent,Margaret Geller and Huchra published the surprisingly non-uniform distribution of galaxies at scales of several tens ofmegaparsecs from early results of theCfA Redshift Survey.[7] De Lapparent, Geller and Huchra described the galaxy distribution as apparently lying on the "surfaces of bubble-like structures".[7] In 1989, using later results from theirredshift survey, Geller and Huchra discovered theGreat Wall, a structure measuring 600 million light years in length and 250 million light years in width.[8][9][10][11][12] This is the second largest known super-structure in the universe.
Thegravitational lensing galaxy in front of the so-calledEinstein Crossquasar was discovered by Huchra and coworkers and has been calledHuchra's Lens.[13][14]
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