Allan Sandage's last paper unravels 100-year-old astronomical mystery
Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - 14:20
in Astronomy & Space
Carnegie's Allan Sandage, who died in 2012, was a tremendously influential figure in the field of astronomy. His final paper focuses on unraveling a surprising historical mystery related to one of his own seminal discoveries. While preparing a history of the Carnegie Observatories in the early 2000s, Sandage came across an unpublished 1944 exchange between two prominent astronomers that piqued his interest. The conversation predated by a decade Sandage's own work on stellar evolution.