Сандра Фабер: Пионер в изучении эволюции галактик

American astrophysicist

Sandra Moore Faber (born December 28, 1944) is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

Faber studied at Swarthmore College, majoring in Physics and minoring in Mathematics and Astronomy. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1966. She then earned her PhD in 1972 from Harvard University, specializing in Optical Observational Astronomy under the direction of I. John Danziger. During this time the only observatory open to her was the Kitt Peak National Observatory, which had inadequate technology for the complexity of her thesis.

Faber married Andrew Leigh Faber, a fellow Swarthmore physics major one year her junior, on June 9, 1967. They have two daughters, Robin and Holly.

In 1972, Faber joined the faculty of the Lick Observatory at University of California, Santa Cruz, becoming the first woman on staff. This was the first proposal of how galaxies have formed and evolved from the Big Bang to today. While some details have been proven wrong, the paper still stands as the current working paradigm for structure information in the universe. She and her collaborators discovered high speed galaxy flows. During the later 1980s, Faber got involved in an eight year project called the "Seven Samurai" collaboration, which attempted to catalogue the size and orbital speeds of 400 galaxies. Though this goal was not met, the group developed a way to estimate the distance to any galaxy, which became one of the most reliable ways to measure the total density of the universe. In 1990, she assisted with the on orbit commissioning of the wide field planetary camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. She says this was one of the most exhilarating and well known phases of her career. The optics of the Hubble were flawed, and Faber and her team helped to diagnose the cause as spherical aberration. In 1995, Faber was appointed University Professor at UCSC. At UCSC she focuses her research on the evolution of structure in the universe and the evolution and formation of galaxies. In addition to this, she led the development of the DEIMOS instrument on the Keck telescopes to obtain spectra of cosmologically distant galaxies. On August 1, 2012 she became the Interim Director of the University of California Observatories. Sandra Faber was a co editor of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics with Ewine van Dishoeck from 2012 to 2021.