Peter J. Young

Peter John Young (31 July 1954—5 September 1981) was a British astrophysicist who made major contributions to extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. He obtained his PhD from California Institute of Technology in 1981. His contributions include the discovery of the intergalactic medium, the detection of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, the identification of the optical counterpart to the first gravitational lens, and the theory of gravitational microlensing.

Early life and education Educated at Leeds Grammar School, Young studied mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge (1972-1975), where he was Senior Wrangler (highest-placed First Class degree) in 1975. He obtained a master's degree in astronomy under the supervision of Gerard de Vaucouleurs at the University of Texas, Austin in 1976. He then began his PhD at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Wallace Sargent.

In 1978, Young et al. and Sargent et al. provided photometric and spectroscopic evidence for a supermassive black hole in the nucleus of the elliptical galaxy M87. This object was latterly revealed via direct high-resolution imaging by the Event Horizon Telescope.

In 1980, Sargent, Young, Boksenberg, and Tytler studied the Lyman-alpha forest in the rest-frame ultraviolet portion of quasar spectra, concluding that it arose from absorption by a cosmological distribution of partly ionized neutral Hydrogen. They also established the existence of the intergalactic medium. Also in 1980, Young et al. identified the galaxy responsible for the first gravitational lens, the Double Quasar Q0957+561. This paper produced the first detailed mass models for a cosmological lensing event.

In 1981, Young realized that the multiple images in Q0957+561 would be affected by the gravitational fields of a large number of stars in the lensing galaxy, leading to rapid fluctuations in the magnification of the quasar images.

By the time of his death after five years at Caltech, Young had written 33 papers. Young committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide which he had obtained from a chemistry stockroom at the university. According to Sargent and Peter Goldreich, Young had suffered from depression and psychological issues since his time at Cambridge and had previously talked about killing himself.