Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich - Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology

Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology

In early 1960s he started working in astrophysics and physical cosmology. In 1964, he and independently Edwin Salpeter were the first to suggest that accretion discs around massive black holes are responsible for the huge amounts of energy radiated by quasars. Since 1965 he was also a professor at the Department of Physics of the Moscow State University, and a head of the division of Relativistic Astrophysics at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute.

Zel'dovich worked on the theory of the evolution of the hot universe, the properties of the microwave background radiation, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the theory of black holes. He predicted, with Rashid Sunyaev, that the cosmic microwave background should undergo inverse Compton scattering. This is called the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, and measuring it is, at present (2005), one of the biggest observational efforts in cosmology. A preliminary interpretation of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) by Benjamin Bernstein has confirmed this theory.