Jesse L. GreensteinBorn 15 Oct 1909; died 21 Oct 2002 at age 93. Jesse Leonard Greenstein was an American astronomer who co-discovered quasars. His interest in astronomy began at age 8 when his grandfather gave him a brass telescope. By age 16, he was a student at Harvard University. After earning his Ph.D.(1937), he joined the Yerkes Observatory under Otto Struve. Thereafter, he spent most of his career at the California Institute of Technology. He measured the composition of stars, through which he found less heavy elements in the stars of globular clusters, thus proving they are younger than our Sun. In 1963, he and Maarten Schmidt were the first to interpret the red shift of quasars and correctly describe their nature as compact, very distant and thus very old objects. With Louis Henyey he designed and constructed a new spectrograph and wide-view camera to improve astronomical observations.« |
