Title: How was neutral hydrogen in our Galaxy discovered?

Speaker: Richard Strom (NAOC, ASTRON & University of Amsterdam) 

Time & Place: Wednesday, 3:00pm, December 18th, Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

Abstract: The discovery of neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) in the interstellar medium was based on a prediction by H. C. van de Hulst. The story of how Jan Oort suggested that the student Van de Hulst might investigate the question, who then reported his results at a wartime colloquium in Leiden, is well known. Recent archival research has turned up letters and other documents which, while not changing the basic storyline, do throw new light on certain details. From letters to Oort, it is now possible to determine when he first heard about Reber?s observations of radio emission from the Milky Way, and what his immediate reaction was. After the 1944 colloquium, Oort began his quest to detect and study the HI line, despite technical and financial limitations, and the lack of radar know-how in the Netherlands. The Dutch effort achieved success in 1951, but not before the Harvard team of Ewen and Purcell had detected the line some six weeks before.

Biog: Born in New York City, Richard Strom attended the Bronx High School of Science for 3 years until his family moved out of New York. He earned a B.A. from Tufts University, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in radio astronomy from the University of Manchester (Jodrell Bank), UK. Until his retirement in 2009, he was a senior research astronomer with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) in Dwingeloo and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He was also an Adjunct Professor at James Cook University in Australia until the Astronomy Centre was closed in 2012. He has been a Senior International Visiting Professor, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010, 2011 and 2012. He was also regularly a Visiting Professor of Physics at the National University of Singapore, and in 2012 was elected a fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 2013 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Qiannan Normal College for Nationalities, Duyun, China. Richard is a past Secretary and Organizing Committee Member of IAU Commission 40 (Radio Astronomy) and is also a member of Commissions 28, 34 and 41. He chaired one of the review panels for the XMM-Newton Observatory, and has served on time allocation panels for BeppoSAX, the European VLBI Network, the UK Infrared Telescope and the Westerbork Radio Telescope. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. His research interests include supernova remnants, gamma-ray bursts, large radio galaxies, pulsars, radio polarimetry, new telescopes (including FAST), Chinese historical records, and the history of radio astronomy, especially in the Netherlands. He has published over 250 papers. Jointly with his colleagues Tony Willis and Andrew Wilson, he discovered giant radio galaxies, the largest radio sources known.