Awarded International Space Hall of Fame (1976).
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Fritz Zwicky
Fritz Zwicky was a Swiss astronomer. He worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy. He was the first to propose supernovas as giant explosions at the end of a star's life, and neutron stars as the remnants left over after supernovas. In 1933, Zwicky proposed…
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science · Swiss astronomer (1898–1974) · astronomer · physicist · university teacher · astrophysicist · also Fritz Zwicky, Zwicky
Born 14 February 1898 · Died 8 February 1974 · Q115462
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1976· 1 entry
1974· 2 entries
Died 1974-02-08.
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Zwicky died in Pasadena, California on February 8, 1974, and was buried in Mollis, Switzerland.
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1972· 2 entries
Won Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1972).
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Zwicky was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, their most prestigious award, for "distinguished contributions to astronomy and cosmology"
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1968· 1 entry
Zwicky was made professor emeritus at California Institute of Technology
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1957· 2 entries
Zwicky launched his experiment on the Aerobee, and successfully fired pellets visible from the Mount Palomar observatory
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And 1969, and claimed that he made many of his discoveries using this method
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1949· 2 entries
Won Medal of Freedom (1949).
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Truman awarded Zwicky the Medal of Freedom, for work on rocket propulsion during World War II
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1948· 1 entry
Spoke of changing planets, or relocating them within the Solar System
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1941· 1 entry
Zwicky and Dorothy divorced amicably in 1941.
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1937· 1 entry
Zwicky posited that galaxies could act as gravitational lenses by the previously discovered Einstein effect
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1935· 1 entry
Gave a Science Service Radio Talk titled "Stellar Guests"
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1934· 2 entries
And Baade coined the term "supernova" and hypothesized that supernovae were the transition of normal stars into neutron stars, as well as the origin of cosmic rays
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Was featured in Literary Digest's "They Stand Out from the Crowd" column,
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1933· 2 entries
Zwicky proposed that unseen dark matter would explain the much higher mass required to explain velocity dispersion in the Coma Cluster, compared to mass calculated from luminosity data
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Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to discover the existence of a gravitational anomaly
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1932· 1 entry
On 25 March 1932, Fritz Zwicky married Dorothy Vernon Gates (1904–1991), a member of a prominent local family and a daughter of California State Senator Egbert James Gates.
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1929· 1 entry
Because the rates measured at that time seemed too large
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1925· 1 entry
Zwicky emigrated to the United States to work with Robert Millikan at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after receiving the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship
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1922· 1 entry
Studied at ETH Zurich (1916–1922).
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1904· 1 entry
At the age of six, Fritz was sent to his paternal grandparents in Glarus, Switzerland, to study commerce
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1898· 1 entry
Born 1898-02-14.
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