Edwin Ernest Salpeter

Edwin Ernest Salpeter (born December 3 1924) is an Austrian-Australian-American astrophysicist. He emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens. He received his PhD from Birmingham University in 1948, under supervision of Sir Rudolf Peierls, since when he has been at Cornell University. He is currently the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences, Emeritus.

Scientific contributions

In 1951 Salpeter suggested that stars could burn helium into carbon with the Triple-alpha process. He later derived the initial mass function for the formation rates of stars of different mass in the Galaxy.

Salpeter wrote with Hans Bethe two articles in 1951 which introduced the equation bearing their names, the Bethe-Salpeter equation which describes the interactions between a pair of fundamental particles under a quantum field theory.

In 1964 Salpeter and independently Yakov B. Zel'dovich were the first to suggest that accretion discs around massive black holes are responsible for the huge amounts of energy radiated by quasars (which are the brightest active galactic nuclei). This is currently the most accepted explanation for the physical origin of active galactic nuclei and the associated extragalactic relativistic jets.

Honors

• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1973)
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1974)
• Bruce Medal (1987)
• Crafoord Prize with Fred Hoyle (1997)

External links

• Bruce Medal page
• bio page
• Oral History interview transcript with Edwin Ernest Salpeter 30 March 1978, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives

References