Name Jaan Einasto Role Physics researcher | Education University of Tartu Fields Cosmology | |
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Born 23 February 1929 (age 95)
Tartu, Estonia ( 1929-02-23 ) Notable awards Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize (2014) Books Dark Matter and Cosmic Web Story | ||
Maailm ja m nda jaan einasto at tedxtallinn
Jaan Einasto (born 23 February 1929, in Tartu) is an Estonian astrophysicist and one of the discoverers of the large-scale structure of the Universe. He is a patriotic Estonian; the name "Einasto" is an anagram of "Estonia" (it was chosen by his patriotic father in the 1930s to replace the family's German name).
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Born in Tartu, he attended the University of Tartu, where he received the Ph.D. equivalent in 1955 and a senior research doctorate in 1972. From 1952, he has worked as a scientist at the Tartu Observatory (1977–1998) Head of the Department of Cosmology; in 1992-1995, he was Professor of Cosmology at the University of Tartu. For a long time, he was Head of the Division of Astronomy and Physics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences in Tallinn. Einasto is a member of the Academia Europaea, the European Astronomical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society; he has received three Estonian National Science Awards.
The asteroid 11577 Einasto, discovered in 1994, is named in his honour.
In 1974, in a seminal work with Kaasik and Saar at the Tartu Observatory, Einasto argued that "it is necessary to adopt an alternative hypothesis: that the clusters of galaxies are stabilised by hidden matter." This was a key paper in recognizing that a hidden matter, i.e., dark matter, could explain observational anomalies in astronomy.