rosie
7th April 2010, 19:07
I ran into this while searching info on dark matter. I cannot help but wonder if this was truly a suicide, as they say his death is possibly due to asphyxiation. His life was quite fascinating, cannot see him ending it with all the new discoveries he has been working on. :confused:
Andrew Lange, an astrophysicist whose balloon-borne measurements of light left over from the Big Bang played a key role in elucidating the shape and nature of the universe, was found dead on Jan. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 52.
Dr. Lange devoted his career to a haze of faint microwaves that pervade the sky, providing a whispery ghost image of the universe when it was only 400,000 years old, before there were stars, galaxies or even atoms.
In the late 1990s, this work put him in the middle of one of the grandest quests in science, the effort to discern the fate of the universe whether it would keep expanding forever or collapse one day into the fire from which it had emerged 14 billion years ago. According to Einstein, that fate was determined by the large-scale geometry of space time, which in turn is determined by the amount of matter and energy in the universe.
Theorists had long favored the Euclidean, or flat, geometry that students learn in school a triangle between three distant quasars would have internal angles that add up to 180 degrees but astronomers could not find enough matter in the universe to make it flat. Dr. Lange and his collaborators found that it was energy that was making it flat.
Dr. Lange was co-leader, with Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, of an experiment called Boomerang, short for Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics. During a 10-day flight at 120,000 feet over Antarctica in 1998, the gadget was able to detect and map faint ripples in the microwave glow, which could be used like the ticks on a ruler to gauge the cosmos and read off its geometry and other parameters.
more, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/science/space/28lange.html
Andrew Lange, an astrophysicist whose balloon-borne measurements of light left over from the Big Bang played a key role in elucidating the shape and nature of the universe, was found dead on Jan. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 52.
Dr. Lange devoted his career to a haze of faint microwaves that pervade the sky, providing a whispery ghost image of the universe when it was only 400,000 years old, before there were stars, galaxies or even atoms.
In the late 1990s, this work put him in the middle of one of the grandest quests in science, the effort to discern the fate of the universe whether it would keep expanding forever or collapse one day into the fire from which it had emerged 14 billion years ago. According to Einstein, that fate was determined by the large-scale geometry of space time, which in turn is determined by the amount of matter and energy in the universe.
Theorists had long favored the Euclidean, or flat, geometry that students learn in school a triangle between three distant quasars would have internal angles that add up to 180 degrees but astronomers could not find enough matter in the universe to make it flat. Dr. Lange and his collaborators found that it was energy that was making it flat.
Dr. Lange was co-leader, with Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, of an experiment called Boomerang, short for Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics. During a 10-day flight at 120,000 feet over Antarctica in 1998, the gadget was able to detect and map faint ripples in the microwave glow, which could be used like the ticks on a ruler to gauge the cosmos and read off its geometry and other parameters.
more, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/science/space/28lange.html