(Died: December 28, 2013)
Astronomer
Interests: Astronomy, Galaxies, Quasars, Pulsars, Redshift, Big Bang Age: 86
Halton Christian Arp received his Bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1949 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1953, both cum laude. He is a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, conducted Edwin Hubble's nova search in M31. He has earned the Helen B. Warner Prize, the Newcomb Cleveland Award and the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. For 28 years he was staff astronomer at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories. While there, he produced his well-known catalog of "Peculiar Galaxies" that are disturbed or irregular in appearance. Arp discovered, from photographs and spectra with the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly - and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically connected to galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Because of Arp's observations, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away - on which the Big Bang theory and all of "accepted cosmology" is based - has to be fundamentally reexamined.
Articles:
- "A Possible Relationship Between Quasars and Clusters of Galaxies" Astrophysical Journal, 2001, V549, pp. 802-819 (with D. G. Russell).
- Dennis Overbye, "Halton C. Arp, Astronomer Who Challenged Big Bang Theory, Dies at 86" (Jan 6, 2014).
