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         BOLETIM ELETRÔNICO DA SAB N. 451 - EXTRA - 05/12/2008
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SEÇÃO: INFORMES

Responsável: Helio J. Rocha-Pinto             (helio@astro.ufrj.br)

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NOTA DE FALECIMENTO EDWIN SALPETER (1925-2008)
(Comunicado por Jane Gregorio Hetem)

Repassamos mensagem de Dan Watson, com a triste notícia sobre a morte  
de Ed Salpeter. 

Ed Salpeter, one of the greatest physicists among us, has passed away.  
I'm sure we can all instantaneously summon some memories of important  
lessons we've learned from Ed's work, over the full range from his  
quantum mechanics/atomic physics textbook (with Bethe), to his  
determination of the stellar mass function, to his demonstration that  
the triple-alpha process powers horizontal-branch stars, to his  
explanation of the large luminosity of quasars as emission by 
accretion  disks around supermassive black holes, to his demonstration 
(with  Hollenbach) that interstellar molecular hydrogen forms on grain  
surfaces... it's truly difficult to find anything we work on nowadays,  
to which he did not contribute some of the fundamentals. 

I did not know Ed well, but had the privilege of meeting him and 
working  with him a little bit a long while back: not too many on the 
Disks team  would know this, but Ed was an original member of the 
SIRTF-IRS  instrument team. He even threw one of his legendary parties 
for our  team, somewhere either during the proposal-preparation 
process or soon  after we were selected (my memory about the details 
of those years is  beginning to fail!). He was a great scientist, and 
a fun person to have   around, and he'll be missed. 

Dan

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