A British astronomer who went lacking whereas visiting the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla website in Chile was discovered useless after practically two months of looking.
Professor Tom Marsh, an knowledgeable in binary stars on the University 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). Per week later, on Thursday (Nov. 17), the University of Warwick, the place Marsh had labored for practically twenty years, issued a statement (opens in new tab) confirming his loss of life.
Neither ESO nor the University 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 point out up for a scheduled remark session, in line with 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 at the moment 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 intensive search operation that scoured the distant mountainous area on the sting of the Atacama Desert.
“It’s the news we had all been dreading over the last two agonizing months,” Chris Ennew, provost on the University of Warwick, mentioned within the assertion. “It’s heart-breaking and painful to know we have lost Tom.”
Marsh was a founding member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at Warwick and was an internationally famend knowledgeable within the evolution of binary stars and the physics of their accretion disks. He contributed to the event of latest observing strategies and helped construct new devices for telescope observations, in line with the college assertion.
In 2018 he obtained the Herschel Medal from the U.Ok.’s Royal Astronomical Society for his 4 a long time in observational astrophysics. Marsh held a Ph.D. from Cambridge University within the U.Ok. Subsequently, he labored on the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland earlier than transferring on to Oxford University. He joined the University of Warwick in 2003.
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