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Arecibo Observatory

(Encyclopedia)Arecibo Observatory, radio-astronomy facility located near Arecibo, Puerto Rico, part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center. Conceived by, designed by, and built under the supervision of Wil...

Wilson, Robert Woodrow

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Robert Woodrow, 1936–, American radio astronomer, b. Houston, Tex., Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1962. In 1964 he and co-researcher Arno Penzias began monitoring radio waves in ...

Doppler effect

(Encyclopedia)Doppler effect, change in the wavelength (or frequency) of energy in the form of waves, e.g., sound or light, as a result of motion of either the source or the receiver of the waves; the effect is nam...

Branly, Édouard

(Encyclopedia)Branly, Édouard ādwärˈ bräNlēˈ [key], French physicist and physician. He was professor of physics at the Catholic Institute, Paris, from 1875. He developed (1890) a coherer for the detection of...

galactic cluster

(Encyclopedia)galactic cluster: see star cluster. ...

black hole

(Encyclopedia)black hole, in astronomy, celestial object of such extremely intense gravity that it attracts everything near it and in some instances prevents everything, including light, from escaping. The term was...

Hewish, Antony

(Encyclopedia)Hewish, Antony, 1924–, British astrophysicist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1952. Hewish spent his entire career as a faculty member at Cambridge, retiring in 1989. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics wit...

interstellar matter

(Encyclopedia)interstellar matter, matter in a galaxy between the stars, known also as the interstellar medium. The interstellar gas, which constitutes about 99% of the interstellar matter, consists mostly of hyd...

Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf

(Encyclopedia)Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf hĕrts [key], 1857–94, German physicist. He confirmed J. C. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and in the course of experiments (1886–89) produced and studied electromagnetic...

Penzias, Arno Allan

(Encyclopedia)Penzias, Arno Allan, 1933–, German-American physicist, b. Munich, Germany, Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1962. He fled Nazi Germany with his family and after finishing school began work at Bell Telephone La...