Allan Sandage

Allan Sandage once said that when he became a graduate student at Caltech, in the late 1940s, he was a “hick who fell off the turnip truck.” He fell at the feet of Edwin Hubble, the most famous astronomer of the time. Hubble was ill, so Sandage gathered data for him at the world’s largest telescope. When Hubble died, a few years later, Sandage took over much of his work. And like Hubble, he expanded the size and age of the universe, and shaped much of the debate over its fate. Sandage was born 100 years ago today, in Iowa City. He got interested in astronomy while looking through the telescope of a boyhood friend. Over the decades, he contributed to many areas of astronomy. As an example, he pioneered studies of globular clusters – large clumps of ancient stars. That work led to a better understanding of the age of the universe. Many of the stars in globulars appeared to be older than the universe – an impossibility. Sandage used that and other lines of evidence to greatly increase the known age of the universe. One line of evidence was the rate at which the universe is expanding – a number known as the Hubble constant. Hubble himself had come up with a number that was much too big, implying a much younger age. Sandage calculated a rate that was close to modern numbers. Sandage wasn’t always right. But his work shaped the field of cosmology for decades – and still has an impact today. Script by Damond Benningfield