Noah Brosch

Did You Know?

• Brosch published a semi-popular book titled 'Sirius Matters' about the star Sirius.
• He was a founding member of the Network for Ultraviolet Astrophysics (NUVA), a pan-European network.
• The ratio of dust grain size to distance of studied galaxies is 31 orders of magnitude.

Biography

Noah Brosch was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1948 and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1963. He earned a BSc and MSc from Tel Aviv University in 1975 and 1977, respectively, and a PhD from Leiden University in 1983. He holds a tenured position as Principal Research Associate at Tel Aviv University, equivalent to Research Associate Professor. Brosch served as Director of the Wise Observatory from 2000 to 2006 and again from 2007 to 2010. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union and was Vice-President of its Division XI from 2009 to 2012. He retired in May 2017 due to the age limit but continues active research.

TAUVEX

Brosch was the Principal Investigator of the TAUVEX space telescope array from 1989 to 2011. TAUVEX was designed to study the ultraviolet sky using three co-aligned telescopes, each imaging a one-degree wide region. Selected in 1988 by the Israel Space Agency as its first priority experiment, the project was cancelled after launch attempts on the Spektr-RG platform and later on the Indian GSAT-4 spacecraft failed. The Israel Space Agency also refused to allow the flight model to be used for balloon flights.

Research and achievements

Brosch and his MSc student Adi Zitrin identified a possible dark matter filament near the Milky Way and Local Group as a chain of galaxies in the local void, later confirmed by McQuinn et al. (2014). With another student, he showed that many near-Earth asteroids are likely rubble piles, suggesting that nuclear explosive mitigation attempts might not succeed. He organized a campaign to observe the 1999 Leonid meteor shower, involving ground teams in Israel with intensified video cameras and airborne observations from two NASA aircraft deployed to Ben Gurion airport, along with a phased-array radar; results were published in the book 'Leonid Storm Research'. Brosch published several papers on Hoag's Object, a ring galaxy, and with student Ido Finkelman and colleagues from Russia and the Netherlands showed that its visible ring is part of a larger neutral hydrogen ring, likely accreted by the elliptical core at least one billion years ago. He and colleagues studied extragalactic dust in elliptical galaxies with dark lanes by modeling and subtracting light distributions to derive extinction laws, finding typical dust grain sizes of about 0.1 micron at distances of roughly 50 Mpc. Brosch and his students also investigate star formation in galaxies, with contributions on dwarf galaxies and the influence of environment on galaxy formation and evolution.