Donald C. Backer

Donald Charles Backer (November 9, 1943 – July 25, 2010) was an American astrophysicist who primarily worked in radio astronomy. Backer made important contributions to the understanding and study of pulsars (including the discovery of the first millisecond pulsar), black holes, and the epoch of reionization.

Biography Backer was born in Plainfield, New Jersey. He attended Cornell University, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in engineering physics (B.E.P.) from Cornell University in 1966. He received a Master of Science degree in radio astronomy from Manchester University in 1968, and then returned to Cornell to earn his doctorate in astronomy in 1971. Backer then took post-doctoral positions first at NRAO in Charlottesville, Virginia (1971–1973), and then at NASA/GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland (1973–1975). In 1975, Backer moved to the University of California, Berkeley as a research astronomer in the Radio Astronomy Laboratory, and became professor of astronomy at Berkeley in 1989.

Donald C. Backer was married to the artist Lutz Bacher for almost 40 years.

Research Backer's early work focused on pulsars. He discovered the first millisecond pulsar, PSR B1937+21, which rotates at 642 Hz (1.558 ms), a rate far beyond what was expected of pulsars before its discovery. Backer was also involved in the discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet around PSR B1620-26, thought to be the oldest known extrasolar planet. Backer pioneered efforts to detect gravitational waves from rapidly rotating neutron stars, aiming to set limits on the gravitational wave background of the universe.

Backer was also a pioneer in Very Long Baseline Interferometry, a technique in radio astronomy used to achieve high angular resolution images of astronomical sources. His efforts here were directed towards understanding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These arrays are simple long wavelength telescopes that hope to detect the redshifted hydrogen line from a time very early in the history of the universe when hydrogen was neutral, and by doing so study the first objects that formed in the universe.