Lyman Spitzer Jr.

Lyman Spitzer (June 26, 1914 in Toledo, Ohio - March 31, 1997 in Princeton, New Jersey) was an American theoretical physicist.

At the age of thirty-three he had already been a researcher at Harvard and Yale universities, worked during World War II at Columbia University, and entered the campus of Princeton University, where he carried out his latest research. Spitzer worked in several areas of theoretical astrophysics, such as the formation of lines in the spectra of celestial objects and the movement and formation of stars, among others. His most important work was on the interstellar medium, the gas between stars and from which they are born.

In addition to anticipating the existence of so-called molecular clouds, in 1956 Lyman Spitzer predicted the existence in the interstellar medium of a very tenuous but very hot gas, with temperatures of one million degrees Celsius. Such a gas was discovered 17 years later with the advent of space observatories. It was Spitzer, more than any other astronomer, who pointed out the different facets that the gas between the stars can take. In 1958 studying groups of stars in our galaxy, he deduced a mechanism by which they lose stars and eventually break up. He was also a leader in the development of space observatories, in particular the Copernicus Space Telescope, designed to study the ultraviolet light that our atmosphere absorbs. He most recently supported the development of the Hubble Space Telescope, probably the most successful space observatory ever. Among the many honors he received, he was the first astronomer to receive the Crafoord Prize in 1985.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, launched by NASA on August 25, 2003, lives up to its name.