Obituary of Halton Arp

Edited from Wikipedia, image courtesty of Wikimedia Commons

Arp was born March 21, 1927, in New York City. He was married three times, has four daughters and five grandchildren. His bachelor’s degree was awarded by Harvard (1949), and his PhD by Caltech (1953). Afterward he became a Fellow of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1953, performing research at the Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory. Arp became a Research Assistant at Indiana University in 1955, and then in 1957 became a staff member at Palomar Observatory, where he worked for 29 years. In 1983 he joined the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. He died in Munich, Germany on December 28, 2013.

Arp compiled a catalog of unusual galaxies titled Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which was first published in 1966 Arp realized that astronomers understood little about how galaxies change over time, which led him to work on this project. This atlas was intended to provide images that would give astronomers data from which they could study the evolution of galaxies. Arp later used the atlas as evidence in his debate on quasi-stellar objects (QSOs).

In 1960, Arp was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society, a prize “normally awarded annually for a significant contribution to observational or theoretical astronomy during the five years preceding the award.”

In the same year, Arp was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for his address, “The Stellar Content of Galaxies”, read before a joint session of the American Astronomical Society and AAAS Section D.

In 1984, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award.