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Halton C Arp

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Halton C. Arp
Halton C. Arp
Born(1927-03-21)March 21, 1927
New York City, United States
DiedDecember 28, 2013(2013-12-28)
Munich, Germany
ResidenceD-85741 Garching, Germany
NationalityUSA / German
Known forAstronomy, Galaxies, Quasars, Redshift, Intrinsic redshift, Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies
Scientific career
FieldsAstronomer

Halton Christian "Chip" Arp (March 21, 1927 – December 28, 2013) was an American astronomer, best known for his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and for his sustained observational challenge to the Big Bang interpretation of redshift. His work on apparently connected objects of widely differing redshift made him one of the most prominent scientific critics of standard cosmology in the twentieth century.

Education

Arp was born on March 21, 1927 in New York City. He received his Bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1949 and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, both cum laude.

Career

After completing his doctorate, Arp became a Fellow of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1953, carrying out research at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories. He was a Research Assistant at Indiana University from 1955, and joined the staff of Palomar Observatory in 1957, where he remained for close to three decades. Earlier in his career he conducted Edwin Hubble's nova search in M31.

In 1983 Arp moved to Germany to join the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, where he continued his research until his death in Munich on December 28, 2013.

Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies

While at Palomar, Arp compiled his well-known catalogue of peculiar galaxies — galaxies that are disturbed or irregular in appearance — published in 1966 as the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. The catalogue remains widely used; in mainstream astronomy many of its entries were later interpreted as interacting and merging galaxies.

Redshift and the Big Bang

Arp's central and most controversial claim arose from photographs and spectra taken with the large telescopes. He found that many quasars (quasi-stellar objects) with extremely high redshift z values — which on the standard interpretation must be receding rapidly and therefore lie at very great distances — appear to be physically connected to galaxies of low redshift that are known to be relatively nearby.

If such associations are real, then redshift cannot be purely a measure of distance and recession velocity: some component must be intrinsic to the object. On Arp's view this means the assumption that high-redshift objects must be far away — the assumption on which the Big Bang theory and much of accepted cosmology rests — has to be fundamentally re-examined. He developed the argument across four books, including Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies (1987) and Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science (1998), the latter also an account of the professional resistance his work met.

Honors

  • Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy
  • Newcomb Cleveland Award
  • Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award
  • Sagnac Award, Natural Philosophy Alliance (2011)

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Media

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