Hyron Spinrad

Hyron Spinrad ( born February 17, 1934 in New York City ) is an American astronomer.

Spinrad studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1961 on stellar populations in galactic nuclei. After that, he was a Senior Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, before he became Assistant Professor in 1964 and in 1968 professor of astronomy at Berkeley.

In 1986, he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Spinrad dealt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the study of the atmosphere of planets of the solar system and discovered in 1963 water vapor in the Martian atmosphere and certain whose carbon dioxide content.

In the 1970s he studied galaxies from the third Cambridge catalog of radio sources at high redshift and discovered in 1975 first galaxies with redshifts z> 1 He also found that at that time () significantly more (factor) radio galaxies were than today.