User:Yerevantsi/sandbox/Ambartsumian/research

User:Yerevantsi/sandbox/Ambartsumian

basic research

Dr. Ambartsumyan's main focus was on the evolution of stellar systems, both galaxies and smaller star clusters, and on the processes attending the evolution of stars.

General
and played a major part in establishing theories of stellar evolution and the existence of protostars. He also worked on galactic evolution and determined that they contained at their centres dense massive bodies of unknown nature, as well as studying the interstellar medium and stellar dynamics.

Ambartsumian is best known for his pioneering work in three areas: (1) invariance principles as applied to the theory of radiative transfer; (2) inverse problems of astrophysics; and (3) the empirical approach to problems of the origin and evolution of stars and galaxies.

"has done work of fundamental importance on philosophical questions of stellar astronomy and cosmogony."

life in science

 * translated in

In addition, Viktor Ambartsumian, who is widely known as a major astronomer and the founder of the Soviet school of theoretical astrophysics, never limited his research to the arbitrary branches of astronomy, however broad these may have been.

Viktor Ambartsumian was born on September 18, 1908, in Tbilisi.

his father, Amazasp Asaturovich Ambartsumian, a lawyer by profession and a literary scholar and philologist by vocation

On completing gymnasium in Tbilisi, he initially entered Leningrad Pedagogical Institute and, after a year and a half, transferred to the famous Leningrad State University, where astronomers taught in the faculty of mathematics and mechanics,

Essentially Ambartsumian was examining the inverse Sturm-Liouville problem, which dealt with determining the equations of a vibrating string. This paper was published in 1929 in the German physics journal Zeitschrift für Physik and remained in oblivion for a rather long time. Describing this situation after many decades, Ambartsumian said, "If an astronomer publishes an article with a mathematical content in a physics journal, then the most likely thing that will happen to it is oblivion." Nevertheless, toward the end of the Second World War this article was found by Swedish mathematicians and formed the starting point for a large series of studies. Thus, an article by the 20 year old Ambartsumian opened up a whole area of research on inverse problems and when he summarized the types of research results from his long scientific career

he always placed "inverse problems" in a special group of his most beloved creations. Several years later he examined yet another inverse problem. This involves determining the spatial velocities of stars for a given set of coordinates and radial velocities of these stars, but without invoking their proper motions. This paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935 (vol. 96, p. 172), introduced by Arthur Eddington. The problem was solved in the elegant style associated with Ambartsumian and was given outstanding marks by specialists. The solution involved numerical inversion of the Radon transform, a method used many years later in the mathematical programming behind the operation of tomography, which has become a vital modern medical tool. In 1985, Allan Cormack of the Physics Department of Tufts University in Massachusetts, who received the Nobel prize in 1979 for developing tomography, commented, "Even in 1936 computed tomography might have been able to make significant contributions to, say, the diagnosis of tumors in the head .... it seems to me quite possible that Ambartsumian's numerical methods might have made significant contributions to that part of medicine had they been applied in 1936" (Computed Tomography, Some History and Recent Developments, Proc. Symp. in Applied Mathematics, vol. 29, p. 35 (1985)).

There is yet another paper, written jointly with Dmitrii Ivanenko in the very beginning of his scientific career (Dokl. AN SSSR, ser. A, No. 6, p. 153 (1930)), that can be included in the list of the most outstanding papers on the structure of the atomic nucleus. Contrary to the prevailing opinion of the time that the nucleus consists of protons and electrons, they proved that free electrons cannot exist within the nucleus and that some neutral particles must be present besides the protons. In fact, this was a prediction of the existence of the neutron, made two years before James Chadwick discovered this particle.

The first department of astrophysics in the Soviet Union was set up at Leningrad University on his initiative in 1934 and he became the chairman of the department and was appointed professor. A year later, when the academic degrees of candidate and doctor of sciences were first introduced in the Soviet Union, by a resolution of the scientific council of Moscow State University he was also granted a doctoral degree in physical and mathematical sciences without having to defend a thesis.

During the 1930's Viktor Ambartsumian obtained quite a few genuinely important results in several areas of astrophysics. He devoted a long series of papers to various problems in the physics of gaseous nebulae. It was clear that nebulae either reflect the light from stars or reprocess that light to generate their own "nebular" spectrum. But there was still no self consistent theory for the reprocessing of the short wavelength light from hot stars. He developed a method for studying radiative transfer in gaseous nebulae where the high temperature radiation interacts with the cold gas and thereby transforms its spectrum. For analyzing this problem he separated the radiation into a continuum spectrum and lines. It was shown that the radiative transfer problem in gaseous nebulae is solved by examining the transfer of radiation in the Lyman alpha line.

Ambartsumian focussed on a very important phenomenon which takes place during the interaction of ultraviolet radiation with the atoms and ions of the gas in nebulae-- the enormous effect of radiation pressure on the dynamics of nebulae. He showed that planetary nebulae with a regular shape that have a hot star in their center should expand and dissipate very rapidly owing to radiation pressure. But this meant that nebulae of this sort cannot be old formations. Based specifically on these simple, but rigorously proven conclusions, he constructed a new concept of the formation of nebulae by the ejection of matter from central stars. It can be said this result became the reference point for the beginning of his cosmogonic concept, which is based on a new paradigm: the evolution of cosmic objects, like that of the universe as a whole, proceeds in the direction of a gradual reduction in the average density of matter. Subsequently this concept found application in Ambartsumian's cosmogony for describing the formation of stars and galaxies.

In 1933 Ambartsumian and Nikolai Kozyrev published a paper on methods for determining the mass of circumstellar gaseous shells. They showed, for example, that during the explosion of a nova, the star ejects an amount of mass roughly equal to one hundred thousandth of the sun's mass. They also concluded that during a star's lifetime, a nova explosion may be observed not once, but many times; that is, a star which is capable of a nova outburst can actually manifest repeated bursts. By the same method they found that a supernova can eject a mass of matter comparable to that of the sun, which, of course, cannot pass without trace for the supernova star, itself. These estimates can still be found in any textbook on astronomy.

Among his publications of the 1930's, Viktor Ambartsumian himself identified a number of the most important articles among which, besides those devoted to the physics of gaseous nebulae, he referred to a study of the dynamics of open stellar associations, a statistical study of binary stars in our galaxy, and a proof of the clumped structure of absorbing matter in the galaxy. In the first of these papers, proceeding from a study of all the main regular and irregular forces, he concluded that the galaxy can be treated as a system which is controlled by regular forces-- the combined attractive force field of all the stars in the galaxy. This means that irregular forces, such as the perturbation forces of individual stars arising when they come close to one another, can be neglected when examining the dynamics of the galaxy as a whole. However, when considering individual stellar associations in the galaxy, these perturbation forces cannot always be neglected; on the other hand, they often play a significant role and, to a great extent, determine the fate of these

systems. For the purpose of studying these systems, Ambartsumian developed some new techniques of statistical physics applicable to this case. Using his own methods, he obtained some extremely important results. Omitting the details, the results of these statistical studies can be formulated quite simply: in any such system a certain velocity distribution is established such that a certain fraction of the stars acquires a velocity greater than the escape velocity of the system and leaves it, after which the system must again arrive at a new velocity distribution. The star loss process continues again and again with each new velocity distribution. In this way, associations gradually "evaporate," and each time, dwarf stars, with their comparatively low masses, leave the association with a higher probability. The numerical results of these studies indicated that the half life for the known stellar associations in our galaxy is less than 1010 years. On the other hand, the luminosity functions of real clusters show that they contain many dwarf stars. More detailed calculations favor a physical picture in which these stellar associations are younger than their half decay times. Based on these data, Ambartsumian concluded that the age of our galaxy is less than ten billion years.

In its essence, this conclusion was a great aid in establishing the correct age of the observable universe. Few know now that then, more than 70 years ago, the prevailing view was that our galaxy is much older, with its age calculated to be ten thousand billion years. This was based on statistical studies of binary stars by the well known British scientist James Jeans and was known as the "long time scale." Ambartsumian reexamined the distribution of the orbital elements of binary systems and their decay owing to tertiary approach of other stars and found that in our galaxy a dissociative equilibrium between formation of binary systems and their decay owing to tertiary approaches has not yet developed. Given also that the time for our galaxy to establish such an equilibrium is roughly ten billion years, he concluded that our galaxy cannot be older than that age; this estimate of the age of the universe has entered science under the name "short time scale."

Besides establishing the "short time scale," his results in this area had another important cosmogonic significance. It was, in fact, shown that the probability of formation of binary stars from single stars is extremely small; at present the observed fraction of wide pairs compared to single stars in our galaxy is several tens of billions of times greater than it should be under dissociative equilibrium. The conclusion is, thus, very simple: the components of binary systems have a common origin. The same holds for multiple systems and clusters of stars. And the fact that in our galaxy a dissociative equilibrium is far from established for either case, indicates that the process has a privileged direction-- specifically, all stellar systems, beginning with binary stars and finishing with stellar clusters, enrich the general field of individual stars, thereby reducing both the number of stars in these systems and the number of systems, as such.

Specialists consider another important and extremely elegant result of Viktor Ambartsumian during this period to be the discovery of the open structural features of the absorbing matter in our galaxy. He showed that the absorption of light cannot be the result of the interaction of the light with the gaseous component of the interstellar matter. The only cause of such absorption could be a dust component. Along with his student Shalva Gordeladze he showed that the relationship between dust clouds and the stars illuminating them is random and on this basis they concluded that the number of dust clouds must be roughly 2000 times greater than the observed number of them. This result, in turn, made it possible to prove that light is absorbed in the interstellar matter of our galaxy by a multitude of individual clouds, rather than by a continuous dusty medium. Retaining this starting point, later, at the end of the

1930's, Ambartsumian created an extremely clever theory which gives a very good description, both qualitatively and quantitatively, of the fluctuations in the brightness of the Milky Way. Furthermore, he was able to obtain an estimate for the mean absorption in a single cloud of 0m.27. Chandrasekhar referred to these papers as a "marvelously elegant formulation of the fluctuations in brightness of the Milky Way in the limit of infinite optical depth, [which] showed that the probability distribution of the fluctuations in the brightness of the Milky Way is invariant with respect to the location of the observer."

At that time he was only 28 years old and he did not realize what consequences his note, written to defend an "enemy of the people," might have. In any case, Kozyrev was sentenced to 10 years, while Viktor Ambartsumian's "wrecking activity" twice became a subject of discussion at the general assembly of the university. Among other nonsense, he was accused of demoralizing the astrophysics department which he had created and made into a major research center. The second half of 1937 and the beginning of 1938 were the most difficult period in his life. But the search for "wreckers" came to a halt in 1938.

1939 was quieter: in January he was chosen to be a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, his textbook Theoretical Astrophysics, the first book of its kind and content, was published, and he was named director of the astronomical observatory of Leningrad State University. Two years later he became prorector of the university for scientific work.

The war situation compelled scientists to work on research of military significance. Ambartsumian turned to radiative transfer problems, since solutions of this kind of problem might be used, for example, for detecting enemy

submarines in the turbid medium of ocean water. At the very beginning of his scientific career these problems had interested him from an astrophysical standpoint and he already had some definite achievements in this area. In the very difficult conditions of the wartime home front his unusual ability to approach old problems in a new way showed up clearly again. Based on simple physical arguments, Viktor Ambartsumian reformulated the well known problem of the reflection of light from a semi-infinite medium and was able to reduce it to functional equations that could be solved more conveniently. The basis of this method was a simple, but extremely fruitful invariance principle which states that the reflectivity of a semi-infinite medium made up of plane-parallel layers should not vary if a layer of finite optical depth with the same optical properties as the infinite medium is added to the boundary of the latter.

Even today, new domains of application for this method of Ambartsumian's are being found. The invariance principle formulated by him and various modifications of this principle are being used to solve extremely complicated problems in astrophysics, mathematical and theoretical physics, electronics, geophysics, atmospheric physics, and other areas of science. These problems and the associated mathematical apparatus are constantly becoming more complicated, but the basis is still Ambartsumian's invariance principle with its winning clarity, of which the American mathematician Richard Bellman has written the following: "Ambartsumian's invariance principles, when extended, lead to the theory of invariant embedding. This is a very powerful technique of mathematical physics and analysis." Ambartsumian, himself, held the invariance principle in special regard and always considered it to be one of his most successful and beloved creations.

With some reservations, the creation of the invariance principle can be regarded as the culmination of the Leningrad stage of Viktor Ambartsumian's scientific career. During the war years, when he worked in Elabug, efforts were underway in Armenia to create the Armenian Academy of Sciences. The leader of these activities was the well known Armenian scholar and orientalist, Academician Iosif Orbeli, who was the director of the Leningrad Hermitage. In November 1943 a constituent assembly was set up and a republican academy was created, including twenty three member-founders, with Iosif Orbeli as president. Although Viktor Ambartsumian was not able to come to Erevan to participate in the assembly, he was elected vice president of the Armenian Academy. He also acquired the duties of director of the Erevan Observatory, the only astronomical institution in Armenia. In 1945 a department of astrophysics was opened at Erevan University at Ambartsumian's initiative and headed by him. A year later, a resolution was passed to build an astrophysical observatory, the location of which was chosen to be a place on the south slope of Mount Aragats next to the village of Byurakan. The observatory was officially named the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory.

With the creation of the Byurakan Observatory the basic principles which its creator had insisted should be the cornerstone of scientific research were brought to life. They flowed from the conviction that astrophysics is, first of all, an observational science, for which observational data are of dominant importance. Viktor Ambartsumian formulated his scientific credo in the following way: "Astrophysics is a part of the exact sciences that studies a vast, unimaginable world. No matter how powerful human thought may be, it cannot deductively construct the laws of nature's development proceeding solely from argument. Thus, astrophysics is an observational science that relies on facts obtained from measurements." The transfer to Armenia greatly increased Ambartsumian's work load. In 1947, when Orbeli returned to Leningrad, Ambartsumian was elected president of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He held this position for almost half a century, until 1993, and thanks especially to his efforts and talent, the Academy of Sciences of Armenia became a recognized scientific center.

In 1947 Viktor Ambartsumian was elected an honorary member of the American Astronomical Society. Commenting on this, the president of the Society, Subramanian Chandrasekhar wrote, "This is the highest esteem which the American Astronomical Society can confer, and I can say that your remarkable work has been recognized in this manner. I have always admired your brilliant ideas, and am happy that they are recognized everywhere." A year later Ambartsumian was elected vice president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). He was vice president until 1955. In 1961 he was elected president of the IAU and this was the first time a scientist from the eastern block was elected to this post. Incredible effort was required to restore trust among the scientists. JeanPaul Pecker, later a member of the French Academy of Sciences and an assistant to the general secretary of the IAU during Ambartsumian's presidency, recalled that "it is impossible to forget Ambartsumian's wisdom and good humor: his influence on world astronomy was very strong. All astronomers of my generation remember this period with some nostalgia."

His intense research on stellar associations, multiple stellar systems, and the phenomena of variability among individual types of stars continued for roughly a decade, and the first international scientific conference organized at Byurakan in 1956 on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the observatory was devoted to variable stars. In that year his first papers on extragalactic astronomy, dealing with multiple galaxies and the phenomenon of galactic radio emission, were published, although a year before he had already given a talk on this problem in Dublin. Later papers in this series examined blue bursts and satellites of radio galaxies, and, after that, galaxies with two nuclei.

Finally, in 1958 Viktor Ambartsumian gave his famous talk "On the Evolution of Galaxies" at the 11-th Solvay conference. In this talk he first formulated the new idea of active galactic nuclei and the concept of new galaxy formation by the active nucleus of parent galaxies. For the first time in this talk he systematically presented the observational data indicative of different forms of activity, such as gas outflows, collimated flares, and blue satellites connected to a parent galaxy by filaments of luminous matter, etc. Halton Arp recalled how shocked he was, when, after completing his "Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies," he suddenly discovered for himself that Ambartsumian had found much earlier that a galaxy can eject a new, daughter galaxy of lower mass and luminosity. "What impressed me the most was that he had come to this conclusion by just looking at the Schmidt PSSS prints which had much less detail than my reflector plates. When I asked some of the older scientists, they told me that he had presented his conclusions at the prestigious Solvay conference in about 1957. They also related that this select group of the best known scientists in the world had either been completely baffled or laughed privately at these crazy ideas."

Studies of both the dynamic instability of stellar associations and the activity of galactic nuclei indicated an identical path for star formation: from some matter with a sufficiently high density that a large mass is contained in a small volume. Referring to this state as protostellar matter, Ambartsumian began to search both for observational facts that provided direct or indirect evidence of its existence, and for ways to justify this assertion theoretically. Assuming that observational facts and empirically discovered behavior are the foundation of all natural science, including astronomy, he also emphasized that "this is also an exact science, based on the mathematical analysis of observations, on mathematical conclusions from them. For this, it relies on the known laws of physics." The fact that he emphasizes "the known laws of physics" is an indication of yet another credo of his, a belief that at any stage in the development of science, only some fraction of the laws of nature are known. Hence, an all encompassing theory of everything cannot be constructed on the basis of only a part of the existing laws. Extrapolating such a theory into regions where the applicability of these laws is not verified may yield results that have nothing to do with existing reality, but are only pretty trifles to which we mistakenly assign a physical significance.

At the very end of the 1950's and beginning of the 1960's, Ambartsumian, together with Gurgen Saakyan, later a member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, began to study the stability conditions for superdense configurations as a function of mass. This concerned densities of matter which could not be studied in laboratories, so the only possibility was to study it theoretically under conditions such that the physical theories employed have been studied in detail and verified experimentally.

These studies were difficult. At these densities the equation of state is not known and it was unclear whether the known gravitational theories were valid. In fact, these questions remain to our day. But this meant that the

problem could not be solved in its general formulation at the beginning of the 1960's and it cannot be solved today. Essentially, there is still no approved physical theory which could completely refute or prove the possible existence of stable configurations of very large mass at nuclear densities of the sort needed to support Ambartsumian's hypothesis of protogalactic matter in masses equal to those of galaxies. From this standpoint, observational studies of the corresponding processes and objects become more important, as they might lead to the discovery of new observational laws and, thereby, create the grounds for later theoretical generalizations.

Nevertheless, the studies begun by Ambartsumian and Saakyan led to some new results of great importance. Of these, one which stands out in significance is a determination of an upper bound for the mass of a neutron star that exceeds Chandrasekhar's limit for white dwarfs. In any case, these very elegant studies yielded many new physical results and became the starting point for a whole discipline of studies all over the world. Although the main purpose, a theoretical justification for the existence of bunches of matter at nuclear density and with galactic masses, was not achieved, new results of paramount significance on superdense configurations were obtained. We note also that in 1968 the British scientist Anthony Hewish and his student Jocelyn Bell discovered the first superdense objects-- pulsars.

The fact that galactic nuclei manifest various forms of activity was in no doubt to most astronomers involved in extragalactic astronomy by the middle of the 1960's. The adherents of classical concepts of galaxy formation, who first opposed the idea of active galactic nuclei, began, themselves, to develop this idea further by the mid 1960's as it became one of the most actively studied areas in extragalactic astronomy. This undoubtedly, at first, facilitated the discovery of quasars. Just a bit later a long-term program to search for active galaxies with an ultraviolet radiation excess was begun at Byurakan, at Viktor Ambartsumian's initiative. This work was carried out by Beniamin Markarian using the Byurakan Schmidt telescope. The result was the discovery of one and a half thousand galaxies with an ultraviolet excess, or Markarian galaxies, and in a broader sense, the First Byurakan Spectral Survey of the Sky.

The achievements and important results on active galactic nuclei obtained at Byurakan were the reason that the 29-th symposium of the IAU, "Nonstationary Phenomena in Galaxies," was held there in 1966. Practically every expert on extragalactic astronomy participated in the work of the conference. At this symposium, Ambartsumian gave an introductory lecture "On the Activity of Galactic Nuclei," in which he reviewed the achievements in this area following the introduction of the idea of active galactic nuclei. In that same year he participated in a session of the executive committee of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and was elected a member of the executive committee. Two years later he was elected president of the ICSU, and two years after that, as an exception, he was reelected to that post.

At the end of the 1960's, when Ambartsumian was more than certain that he was right about the formation of galaxies and galactic systems, he again returned to his studies of stars. These studies began with his estimate in 1968 of the number of flare stars in the Pleiades cluster. According to the long standing ideas of that time, flare stars were regarded as some sort of exception to the general laws of stellar evolution; there were comparatively few of them and they did not match the known evolutionary scenarios. The theory of the interior structure of stars did not predict the possibility of a phenomenon such as the flaring of stars; thus, flaring was considered to be an outlier phenomenon, although at that time no estimate of the overall number of flare stars existed, so the claim that they

were rare was unsubstantiated. In 1968 Viktor Ambartsumian proposed a very simple but very clever method for determining the overall number of flare stars in a given cluster. Assuming that all the flare stars of a given cluster have the same average flaring frequency and that the flare activity of a star is a Poisson process, he found an expression for the number of stars that flared, but had not undergone flaring during the time the stars were observed, using the number of stars which have flared once or twice. An estimate for the Pleiades cluster far exceeded expectations: it turned out that all the low luminosity stars in this cluster are flare stars. Subsequent international monitoring has fully confirmed this conclusion and served as a basis for a generalization to the effect that all stars with low luminosity and low mass in the early stages of evolution are flare stars.

This result is undoubtedly very important from the standpoint of stellar cosmogony. But it has an importance beyond this. The flare activity of stars in the early stage of their lives once again demonstrated the general tendency of cosmic objects to manifest activity in the form of ejecting excess energy, which is observed after their formation. The same thing is observed with quasars and active galactic nuclei. By now, it is already evident that activity processes characterized by the release of excess energy are observed at all levels of the hierarchy of the cosmos. This activity is usually associated with young objects, so we may conclude that precisely in their first formation stage, objects have extra energy from which they strive to free themselves more rapidly when the excess energy exceeds the upper energy threshold for stability by greater amounts.

Until the end of his life Ambartsumian believed that new galaxies are being born in our epoch. This belief was dictated by observational facts which he studied with special thoroughness and his scientific intuition, which was specially developed in him and continued to develop accumulated experience. He constantly searched for new ways and methods to solve the dilemma arising from the lag of modern physics behind the accumulating observational data, which often leads to paradoxical theoretical results.

One result of his search for possible ways appears to have been a series of papers on a search for compact groups of compact galaxies. Essentially, this search was a modified extension of another series of papers published in the 1950's under the general title "Multiple galaxies and radio galaxies." His certainty that the evolution of galaxies and systems of galaxies begins from more compact formations lead him to conclude that a third class of these systems, beyond the known clusters and groups of galaxies, should exist in the universe in a compact form, itself made up of compact galaxies. To this day, the compact groups of compact galaxies discovered in the 1970's are objects of quite considerable interest and intensive research.

In a discussion of galactic cosmogony, Narlikar, Burbidge, and Vishvakarma note that "Apparently the most perspicacious astronomer of recent history was Viktor Ambartsumian, the well known Armenian theorist. Beginning in the 1950's and 1960's he emphasized the role of bursts in the universe, proving that associations of galaxies (groups, clusters, etc.) manifest a tendency to expand with much greater energy than might be expected assuming that the virial theorem is satisfied .... Here we refer to Ambartsumian's emphatic conclusion that a phenomenon involving the appearance of matter with a higher, outwardly directed, kinetic energy is evidently observed in galactic nuclei."

Today, only a few people remember his discovery of that most interesting research area, now known as "active galactic nuclei (AGN)," and his being absolutely alone in his battle for the right of his extraordinary ideas to live.

Ten years after the Solvay conference, at the plenary session of the IAU in Prague, the well known American

astronomer Alan Sandage said, "sequentially, at the Solvay conference, at the Berkeley meeting of the IAU, and in many symposia, at first almost in the singular, he declared that powerful processes are taking place in galactic nuclei and that astronomers should take them fully into account. The realization of this program is only beginning now. Today, no astronomer would deny the mystery surrounding the nuclei of galaxies or that the first to recognize the rich reward held in this treasury was Viktor Ambartsumian."

Everyone who knew Viktor Ambartsumian remembers him as a very modest man, but they also know that he never was modest in intelligence and ideas. A study of his scientific career and of the ideas which he advanced and defended during his life clearly demonstrates the outspoken "immodesty" of these founding ideas.

The journal Astrofizika is also an offspring of his versatile career. In creating our journal more than four decades ago as an All-union periodical on astrophysics, he gathered under one roof the entire bloom of Soviet astrophysical science of that time

Viktor Ambartsumian died on August 12, 1996, in Byurakan in the house where he had lived with his wife since the early 1950's. The house is now a museum devoted to the great scientist

The Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory has borne the name of its founder, Viktor Ambartsumian, since 1998.

Halton Arp
.......,......... REMAKE ....... +PAGES In order to communicate a feeling for how my appreciation of Ambartsumian's work grew over time

he had presented his conclusions at the prestigious Solvay conference in about 1957. They also related that this select group of the best known scientists in the world had either been completely baffled or laughed privately at these crazy ideas.

I knew Oort fairly well by then. Looking at Ambartsumian he leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You know, Ambartsumian was right about absolutely everything."

It was unanimously agreed that Ambartsumian was a great astronomer. At the same time his statements about the most important fundamentals in astronomy were not believed. This is even more true today.

Ambartsumian was, in my opinion, a Copernican man in Ptolemaic times. With such huge changes in concept about the most fundamental aspects of nature the paradigm takes a very long time to shift. From the common sense of Aristarchus and Eratothsenes there was the interregnum of Ptolemy for 1800 years before the clarity of Copernicus. I would hope, with the light of Ambartsumian shining ahead, that today's astronomers would more quickly relinquish their concentration on epicycles required to shore up a theory of everything created instantaneously out of nothing and follow the observational path to a more profound understanding of how the universe really works.

Parsamian,2008
..........

Graham, 1987
The main point, said, Ambartsumian, was that the origin of the stars was not "from nothing," as he described the theory of the West German physicist P. Jordan.3B Ambartsumian said that not only did Jordan postulate the spontaneous and causeless appearance of stars, but that this view was incorporated into Lemaître's description of the birth of the universe. Ambartsumian considered the terms "birth" or "agé" of the universe, used by Jordan, as careless and inaccurate. Nonetheless, he respected highly much of Jordan's work.

Rather than describing the birth of stars, Ambartsumian's theory described their lives during the period immediately after birth. And even within that limitation, it accounted only for stars on the main sequence~ It either omitted or was unclear about the evolution of such types as white dwarfs and cold giants. Furthermore, the final phases of the stars of the main sequence were not described. Nevertheless, in the field of cosmogony no theorist can claim completeness for his views. Ambartsumian's theories of star formation have justifiably won him the reputation of one of the leading researchers in the field.39

In sum, the strongest element of continuity in Ambartsumian's professional life, from his early emphasis on the birth and evolution of stars to his later emphasis on such rapidly changing phenomena in the universe as supernovae and quasars, has been the principle of astronomical évolution.

Aras
Ambartsumian’s works are distinguished in perfection .......

Ambartsumian has carried out some other investigations of great importance in astrophysics as well, such as the study of interstellar absorbing matter in the Galaxy (the idea of its  ragged  structure,  the theory of fluctuations of light of the Milky Way), works on stellar dynamics (establishing of the base of  new, statistical mechanics of stellar systems), statistical investigations of flare stars, and others. Ambartsumian was an outstanding organizer of science, who significantly promoted the international scientific cooperation.

McCutcheonEnc
Like Kozyrev, the physicist Ivanenko figured as a coauthor in Ambartsumian’s early works. In particular, in the late 1920s, Ambartsumian and Ivanenko tackled the widespread assumption that atomic nuclei consist of protons and electrons. At a time when the neutron had yet to be discovered, most physicists presumed that the weight of a nucleus came entirely from protons. Moreover, if the charge of a nucleus was something other than would be expected from the number of protons, the nucleus must contain negatively charged electrons to offset the positively charged protons. In studying β decay, however, Ambartsumian and Ivanenko came to the conclusion that an electron is created spontaneously at the time it is ejected from an atom and could not, therefore, have been in the atom’s nucleus. The 1930 paper by Ivanenko and Ambartsumian anticipated the discovery of the neutron by two years.

In the mid-1930s, Ambartsumian turned his attention to inverse problems of astrophysics. English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington had posed the question of whether it is possible to determine the distribution of the space velocities of stars based on the distribution of radial velocities. Ambartsumian showed how this can be done, in the process carrying out the first ever numerical inversion of the Radon transform that today is the basis of tomography, the reconstruction of two-dimensional images from a set of one-dimensional projections and angles. The paper containing Ambartsumian’s solution was submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by Eddington himself.

In 1938, Ambartsumian and his student Sh. G. Gordeladze studied bright dusty nebulae and the stars illuminating them. They concluded that such nebulae are illuminated only as a by-product of their accidental placement between the Earth and a bright star. Moreover, Ambartsumian and Gordeladze carried out computations showing that only about 0.05 percent of the galaxy’s dust nebulae are illuminated in this manner by bright stars.From this they concluded that interstellar absorption has a patchy structure and that interstellar matter is in the form of clouds. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar later described Ambartsumian’s approach to studying fluctuations in the brightness of the Milky Way as “marvelously elegant” (p. 3). In 1939, at the age of 31, Ambartsumian was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Even during the war years, Ambartsumian continued his pioneering work in astrophysics, in 1943 developing and applying the invariance principle to the problem of isotropic scattering in a semi-infinite, plane-parallel atmosphere. According to this principle, the reflective capability of a medium consisting of infinitesimally thin, parallel layers of nearly infinite optical depth does not change if a new layer with the same optical properties is added. Applying this principle, Ambartsumian developed a system of simple functional equations describing light scattering in a turbid medium. These equations found immediate application to problems of radiative transfer in the Sun and other stars, and they have since been applied in optics, mathematical physics, and a number of other fields. Chandrasekhar described the principle of invariance as “a theoretical innovation that is of the greatest significance” (1988, p. 3) and did much to develop Ambartsumian’s innovation further.

He remained active as an astrophysicist well into the 1990s as he continued to develop his work on inverse problems of astrophysics, the invariance principle, and stellar and galactic evolution. He raised the stature of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by hosting two SETI conferences, and Armenia became a magnet for foreign astrophysicists traveling to conferences and seminars organized by Ambartsumian at Byurakan.

Chandrasekhar
As one whose main interests during the past thirty or more years have been outside the mainstream of astronomy, the task of writing an essay encompassing all of Ambartsumian’s wide range of accomplishments is outside the circumference of my comprehension. And since many others more conversant than I will be writing about him for this issue, perhaps I may recall some of Ambartsumian’s discoveries which reveal the elegance and clarity of his ideas.

1. One of Ambartsumian’s earliest papers was concerned with Zanstra’s method of determining the temperature of the central star illuminating a planetary nebula. Here is Ambartsumian’s formulation which led to a first treatment of the radiative equilibrium of a planetary nebula: There is a probability, p that an ultraviolet light quantum (that is a quantum beyond the head of the Lyman series) will be transformed into a Lyman-alpha quantum by the process of ionization and recombination followed by cascades: a simple statement that succintly epitomizes Zanstra’s idea.

2. The ‘blanketing’ effect of absorption lines, in warming a stellar atmosphere, can be formulated in a first approximation by postulating that in a given frequency interval there is a probability, p, that an absorption line will occur. With such a formulation, the equations of radiative transfer governing thermodynamic equilibrium can be readily written down; and one obtains a satisfactory theory for the underlying phenomenon.

4. Ambartsumian’s marvelously elegant formulation of the fluctuations in brightness in the Milky Way: in the limit of infinite optical depth, the probability distribution of the fluctuations in the brightness of the Milky Way is invariant to the location of the observer. In the related series of investigations, in part in association with Academician Markarian, Ambartsumian introduced for the first time the now commonly accepted notion that interstellar matter occurs in the form of clouds.

5. Ambartsumian’s discovery of the role of the escape of stars from galactic clusters resulting from the relatively short times of relaxation is as simple as it is profound.

Uspekhi1969
Ambartsumyan is credited with outstanding contributions to stellar astronomy. He was first to suggest a concept of patchy structure of the absorbing matter in the Galaxy. He then developed a theory of brightness fluctuation of the Milky Way. Comparison of the theory with observations made it possible to determine the optical properties of absorbing clouds.

Britannica
In 1932 he advanced his theory of the interaction of ultraviolet radiation from hot stars with the surrounding gas, a theory that led to a series of papers on the physics of gaseous clouds. His statistical analysis of stellar systems in 1934–36, in which for the first time their physical properties were taken into account, was found to be applicable to many related problems, such as the evolution of double stars and star clusters.

His theory of the behaviour of light in a scattering medium of cosmic space, put forward in 1941–43, became an important tool in geophysics, space research, and particularly astrophysics, such as in studies of interstellar matter.

Later, Ambartsumian studied the phenomena in the atmosphere of stars that are changing in physical characteristics, such as luminosity, mass, or density. He saw these changes as being connected with the direct release of interstellar energy in the outer layers of the stars. He also investigated nonstationary processes in galaxies. These investigations are of great importance, both for the problem of the evolution of galaxies and for the study of still-unknown properties of matter.

Ambartsumian’s later works include Problemy sovremennoi kosmogonii (1969; “Problems of Modern Cosmogony”) and Filosofskie voprosy nauki o Vselennoi (1973; “Philosophical Problems of the Study of the Universe”).

Israelian97
The most important steps in his scientific career can be given as:

2) First numerical inversion of the Radon transform (MN-RAS 96, 172, 1935, communicated to the RAS by Arthur Eddington). This involved the 3D velocity distribution of stars in the Galaxy. After many years, A. Cormack (Dept. of Physics, Tufts University) would write in this connection: “Even in 1936 computed tomography might have been able to make significant contributions to, say, the diagnosis of tumors in the head ….it seems to me quite possible that Ambartsumian’s numerical methods might have made significant contributions to that part of medicine had they been applied in 1936” (Computed Tomography, Some History and Recent Developments, Proc. of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Vol. 29, p. 35, 1985).

3) First idea about the patchy structure of interstellar absorption, 1938. S. Chandrasekhar wrote in this connection: “Ambartsumian’s marvelously elegant formulation of the fluctuations in brightness of the Milky Way in the limit of infinite optical depth, showed that the probability distribution of the fluctuations in the brightness of the Milky Way is invariant with the respect to the location of the observer.” Ambartsumian introduced for the first time the now commonly accepted notion that interstellar matter occurs in the form of clouds.

Lynden-Bell & Gurzadyan, 1998
A series of Ambartsumian's works from 1935 to 1939 (9, 12, 14) is devoted to the problems of the dynamics of stellar systems. In 1935, he solved a problem which he attributed to Eddington, namely to find the distribution of the components of the stellar velocities given the distribution of the radial velocities, but without any assumption on the form of that function. The paper was communicated to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (9) by Eddington himself.

In 1937, in a disagreement with Jeans over the age of the Universe, he showed (10) that the wide binary stars have to disintegrate rapidly, and hence their existence puts an upper limit on the age of the Galaxy which corresponds to the short time-scale of -101o years, against Jeans's 'long' time-scale of-1013 years, based on the eccentricity distribution of binaries. In 1938, he evaluated the rate of evaporation of stars from star clusters, thus laying the foundation for the theory of their evolution (12).

Ambartsumian's first paper published from Armenia (19) (in 1944) was in the first issue of the newly established journal, Communications of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, whose Editor he later became. Here he formulated the problem of the correlation of the light intensity from two different directions in the Milky Way, reducing the problem to a simple functional equation. This laid the foundation of the theory of fluctuations in astrophysical problems.

Later he showed that by studies of the brightness fluctuations one can estimate parameters of interstellar absorbing clouds, e.g. their dimensions, optical depths, etc. This problem too found further treatment in a series of papers by Chandrasekhar & Munch in 1950-1952.

He had great influence on his current and former students, even when they had their own established activities. Victor Sobolev, his student from the Leningrad period, succeeded him at the Chair of Astrophysics in Leningrad University and in time himself created a respected school of scholars mainly associated with mathematical aspects of radiative transfer theories and moving atmospheres. Sobolev's group was always in close contact with Byurakan.

Other objects of Ambartsumian's research in later years included radio-galaxies, compact groups of galaxies, diffuse nebulae, flare stars and stars of the FU Orionis type which he called fuors (37). In 1968 and 1978, he published two papers (35, 41) where he developed an original statistical method of estimating the number of flare stars in the systems based on the known parameters of already observed flares. The second paper he dedicated to Hannes Alfven, in view of the remarkable character of the results obtained.

Andrews97
In 1932 he advanced his theory of the interaction of ultravio-let radiation from hot stars with the surrounding gas, a theory which led to a series of papers on the physics of gaseous clouds. His statistical analysis of stellar systems in 1934-1936, which for the first time took account of their physical properties, was found to be applicable to many related problems such as the evolution of double stars and star clusters.

His theory of the behaviour of light in a scattering medium in cosmic space, put forward in 1941-1943, became an important tool in geophysics, space research and, particularly, astrophysics, including studies of the interstellar medium.

In 1943 Ambartsumian joined the Armenian Academy of Sciences in Yerevan and began teaching at the Yerevan state University. In 1946 he organised the construction near Yerevan of the now famous Byurakan Astronomical Observatory. At this most important observatory in the Soviet Union he began a successful period of scientific activity.

Later, Ambartsumian studied phenomena in the atmospheres of stars accompanying changes in luminosity, mass or density. He believed that these changes were connected with energy releases associated with the interstellar material. He also investigated non-stationary processes in galaxies which led to the recognition of the great importance of galactic evolution and to considerations of still unknown properties of matter itself.

Ambartsumian's invariably thought-provoking manner of representation drew large audiences to his lectures at international symposia.

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his work first came to prominence in physics when in 1929 with Dmitry Ivanenko he published a paper demonstrating that atomic nuclei could not be made from protons and electrons. Three years later this was confirmed when Sir James Chadwick discovered neutrons, which with protons make up atomic nuclei.

He directed campaigns of discovery and observation of many of the most interesting objects in the sky including flare stars in clusters and associations, active galaxies and quasars. Without the equipment he fought for, such well-known astronomical catalogues of active galaxies as those of Markarian and Arakelian would never have been produced and Gurzadian's studies of flare stars could not have been made.

Blaauw2007
Victor Ambartsumian formulated ideas pertinent to the structure and evolution of stars, of galaxies - especially active ones - and of the entire Universe. Some of these ideas, for instance the unboundedness of many star clusters and the need for star formation to be an ongoing process, have stood the test of time. Others have not.

In a 1929 paper, Ambartsumian studied the problem: to what degree do the eigenfunctions of an ordinary differential operator determine the functions and parameters entering into that opera-tor? Fifteen years later (1944) this paper attracted the attention of mathematicians in the context of the theory of inverse problems. Ambartsumian's earliest astrophysical work was in solar phys-ics, in collaboration with Nikolai Kozyrev, and in the physics of emission nebulae and radiation transfer, starting from Herman Zanstra's papers in this field. Ambartsumian applied this work to the planetary nebulae and to the so-called Wolf-Rayet stars, both being cases of interaction between a star and its gaseous envelope. This effort led to Ambartsumian's prediction of the existence of a forbidden He line in the spectra of Wolf-Rayet stars, which later was identified.

Studies of the brightness distribution of the Milky Way, in particular the correlation of the brightness in two different directions, led Ambartsumian to estimates of the properties of interstellar clouds. Although it is obvious both from photographs of emission nebulae and dark clouds and from radio-astronomical surveys that description of the structure of the interstellar medium [ISM] in terms of discrete clouds is an oversimplification, this concept has proven to be very helpful in describing the ISM. Ambartsumian's estimates of the dimensions and optical depth of these clouds, and his studies of the relation between the clouds and the exciting, lumi-nous stars belong to the early pioneering steps in this domain.

By the end of the 1930s, Ambartsumian's interest shifted to problems of stellar evolution and to the still more fundamental question of the formation process of the stars. Early work on stellar dynamics had convinced him that wide double stars, contrary to the prevailing view, could not have existed over a timescale (the "long" timescale proposed by James Jeans) very much longer than 10 billion years.

With regard to the origin of the associations, Ambartsumian also took an unorthodox view. He postulated that stars were formed from superdense bodies, a hitherto unknown state of matter, which was contrary to the general belief that star formation was preceded by gradual contraction in an interstellar gas cloud. He identified the very young, compact groups, for which he introduced the name trapezium systems (in analogy with the well-known compact duster in Orion), with the earliest emergence from this primordial matter. This view, however, has not found general acceptance; subsequent developments fully confirm the classic view that star formation follows contraction in the inter-stellar medium. Ambartsumian also postulated an origin from this superdense matter in the case of stellar systems as a whole, referring to the violent processes observed in the central regions of certain galaxies. Here, too, his concept has not found confirmation. However, the extensive surveys of quasars and active galaxies carried out at Byurakan Observatory by his associates, in the context of Ambartsumian's ideas (in particular by Benjamin Markarian), have contributed greatly to our knowledge of extragalactic systems.

The observational programme of Byurakan Observatory has been strongly inspired by Ambartsumian's imaginative thinking.

Ambartsumian's interest then broadened to include stellar evolution, the problem of star formation, and the origin and evolution of stellar systems. In early work on the statistics of double stars he had argued that these cannot have existed for more than ten billion years, a time scale much shorter than was generally accepted at that time. In his work of the 1940s and later on star formation and the origin and evolution of small stellar systems, Ambartsumian’s unorthodox approach drew much attention.

In the years 1941-43, he postulated that certain groups containing stars with ml similar properties, drifting among the general stellar population, are dynamically unstable systems and must be of much more recent origin than the stellar population in general. He called them stellar associations and distinguished two categories: the O-Associations characterized by membership of the massive O- and B-type stars, and the T-Associations containing the, less massive, T-Tauri stars. He pointed out the frequent occurrence of so-called Trapezium-type systems in the O-Associations: compact groups of very massive stars whose lifetime cannot exceed a few million years at most and that must have a common origin. This work has greatly contributed to the now generally accepted view that star formation has been a continuous — and still ongoing — process up to the present. As to the formation process itself, Ambartsumian went even as far as postulating that stellar associations originate from superdense primordial matter, a postulate he later extended to the formation of galaxies in general.