Reuven Ramaty

Reuven Ramaty ( born February 25, 1937 in Timişoara, † April 8, 2001 in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States) was a Romanian -born, Israeli, operating in the U.S. physicist and astronomer.

Reuven Ramaty was born in the city of Timisoara in Romania. After the turmoil of war, he emigrated in 1948 with his parents to Israel, where he studied physics at the University of Tel Aviv. He taught for three years in Physics Tel -Aviv before went to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he became in 1966 a doctorate in astrophysics. The following year, Ramaty joined the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he worked for over 30 years and has become one of the leading theoreticians. He headed the theoretical division of 1980 to 1993. Since 1983, he was Associate Professor at the University of Maryland.

Reuven Ramaty considered a pioneer in high-energy astrophysics. He had great influence in the physics of solar flares and cosmic rays, and the gamma-ray astronomy. Particularly well known Ramaty was predicting an interstellar gamma-ray emission line at 1809 MeV, which was derived from the decay of a supernova and 1982 actually demonstrated.

Ramaty was chairman of the Department of High Energy Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1983-1985) and Chairman of the Department of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society ( 1986-1989). In 1975 he was awarded the Senior U.S. Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and in 1980 the Lindsay Award for his results in the Gammastrahen - astronomy; he was awarded in 1982 by the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal with. The Reuven Ramaty of having initiated HESSI project has been renamed in his honor in 2002 Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager.