A British astronomer who went lacking whereas visiting the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla website in Chile was discovered lifeless after almost two months of looking.
Professor Tom Marsh, an skilled in binary stars on the College of Warwick within the U.Ok., disappeared two days after he arrived in Chile on Sept. 14. A search coordinated by Chilean police discovered a physique, now recognized because the lacking astronomer, final Thursday (Nov. 10). Every week later, on Thursday (Nov. 17), the College of Warwick, the place Marsh had labored for almost 20 years, issued a statement (opens in new tab) confirming his loss of life.
Neither ESO nor the College of Warwick has supplied any particulars in regards to the circumstances surrounding Marsh’s disappearance. A Ph.D. pupil accompanying him on the journey raised the alarm after Marsh failed to indicate up for a scheduled remark session, in response to the Daily Mai (opens in new tab)l.
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Astronomers have visited La Silla Observatory for the reason that Sixties; the location presently hosts 13 lively telescopes, according to ESO (opens in new tab).
The physique was discovered solely 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the observatory after an in depth search operation that scoured the distant mountainous area on the sting of the Atacama Desert.
“It is the information we had all been dreading during the last two agonizing months,” Chris Ennew, provost on the College of Warwick, mentioned within the assertion. “It is heart-breaking and painful to know we now have misplaced Tom.”
Marsh was a founding member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at Warwick and was an internationally famend skilled within the evolution of binary stars and the physics of their accretion disks. He contributed to the event of recent observing strategies and helped construct new devices for telescope observations, in response to the college assertion.
In 2018 he obtained the Herschel Medal from the U.Ok.’s Royal Astronomical Society for his 4 many years in observational astrophysics. Marsh held a Ph.D. from Cambridge College within the U.Ok. Subsequently, he labored on the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London and the House Telescope Science Institute in Maryland earlier than transferring on to Oxford College. He joined the College of Warwick in 2003.
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