R . I . P.
May 16, 2016
French astrophysicist André Brahic, worldwide expert in the solar system, died Sunday in Paris at the age of 73.
Astrophysicist Andrew Brahic, discoverer of Neptune's rings and great passer of knowledge, died Sunday morning in Paris at the age of 73 years, do we learned from his publisher Odile Jacob.
Astrophysicist André Brahic
"It was a brilliant character and extraordinary, extraordinarily warm, deep and authentic, a great scholar and also a storyteller, a writer," said Odile Jacob, who was very close to him.
Global expert in the solar system, Brahic André was born in 1942 in Paris in a modest family. He died of cancer.
Saturn and Neptune
Initiated in astrophysics by Evry Schatzman, the father of the discipline in France after the war, he became in the 1980s a specialist in solar system exploration conducted by the Voyager spacecraft and the US-European Cassini party 1997, which continues to rotate around Saturn.
He is interested in Saturn's rings in 1984 before launching a program that allows it to co-discover the rings of another Neptune gaseous planet with the American astronomer William Hubbard.
Neptune rings
The last ring is divided into four arcs of which three were discovered initially by André Brahic who gave them the names of "Freedom", "Equality" "Brotherhood" in reference to the French national motto, while the last arc was found by one of his collaborators.
Writer and popularizer
Astrophysicist at CEA and professor at the University Paris VII - Diderot, he also led the Gamma-gravity laboratory.
In 1990, the asteroid 3488 located in the belt of the solar system had been baptized Brahic in his honor.
prolific popularizer, he had published five books, including "Children of the Stars" in 1999 and "Lights Stars" in 2008, Editions Odile Jacob. His latest work on exoplanets, "World's elsewhere. Are we alone in the universe? ", Was released last year by the same publisher.
In a statement, the french President François Hollande remember a great scholar "who knew how to make simple the mysteries of heaven."
He "was also a wonderful teacher whose books and interventions made us travel in space," the statement added. La France "loses a prodigious scientific and joyful whose only project was to share his passion for the greatest number."
Astrophysicist André Brahic biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Brahic
Images, Text, Credits: NASA/Wikimedia/AFP/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
Condolences, Orbiter.ch
