19th of June 2020 |
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Vale J-P Macquart |
The astronomical community was shocked and saddened by the news that
Jean-Pierre Macquart passed away recently.
J-P, an Associate Professor at the Curtin Institute of Radio
Astronomy node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research,
started his career at the University of Sydney
and was a postdoc at the Kapteyn Institute in
the Netherlands, and a US National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Jansky Fellow at Caltech.
J-P had a long association with the Australia Telescope National
Facility, collaborating with a number of ATNF staff, and was
co-Principal Investigator of the Commensal
Real-time ASKAP Fast Transient (CRAFT) Survey.
The seminal CRAFT paper reporting the first
measurement of the missing cosmic baryons via the observed dispersion
of Fast Radio Bursts, led by J-P, had been published in Nature
just days before he passed away.
J-P was an exceptional scientist, and the breadth of his interests can be gauged by the titles of his papers, including Nanoarcsecond Single-Dish Imaging of the Vela Pulsar, Strong, Variable Circular Polarization in PKS 1519-273, Microarcsecond Radio Imaging using Earth-Orbit Synthesis, Scattering of gravitational radiation. Second order moments of the wave amplitude, The Rotation Measure and 3.5 Millimeter Polarization of Sagittarius A*, and Fast radio burst event rate counts - I. Interpreting the observations. J-P had an extensive network of colleagues and collaborators, and the astronomical community has lost a great scientist and a dear friend. (Image credit: Keith Bannister) |