Jeremiah Ostriker, who plumbed dark forces that shape universe, dies at 87

Boston Globe

07-04-2025

Before the 1970s, most astronomers believed that galaxies were made up mostly of stars.
'Ostriker was arguably the most important single figure in convincing the astronomical community that this natural and seductive assumption is wrong,' David Spergel, the president of the Simons Foundation, which supports scientific research, wrote in 2022, nominating Dr. Ostriker, his mentor, for the Crafoord Prize, the astronomical equivalent of a Nobel. He cited Dr. Ostriker's 'eloquent advocacy for the then-radical new model in which the visible stars in galaxies were only a minor pollutant at the center of a much larger halo of dark matter of unknown composition.'
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Dr. Ostriker's work, he said, was 'the grandest revision in our understanding of galaxies' in half a century.
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Jerry Ostriker, as he was known to friends and colleagues, had a prickly sense of humor and a soft but commanding voice. Willing to go wherever the data and scientific calculations led him, the astrophysicist was not shy about questioning assumptions — or having fun. Prominently displayed in his home was a youthful photo, taken in Cambridge, Mass., of himself in suit and tie driving a motor scooter as his wife, Alicia, seated behind him, lifted a bottle of wine to her lips. (A close look shows the cork still in the bottle.)
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'He had the quickest wit of any scientist I have encountered,' said James Peebles, a Nobel physics laureate and a colleague of Dr. Ostriker's at Princeton. 'And I don't remember ever matching him in a spontaneous debate' on any issue.
Asked in a 1988 oral history interview for the American Institute of Physics if he had favored any of the models of the universe being batted about in the 1970s, when he entered the field — whether the universe was finite or infinite, whether it had a beginning or was somehow always here, whether it would expand forever or crash back down in a big crunch — he said he had not.
'Scientists have followed their own biases, and my principle bias at the time was being contemptuous and intolerant of all of these people who had specific models,' he answered. 'How could they be so certain when the evidence was as confusing and inconclusive?'
Jeremiah Paul Ostriker was born April 13, 1937, on the Upper West Side, the second of four siblings. His father, Martin Ostriker, ran a clothing company, and his mother, Jeanne (Sumpf) Ostriker, was a teacher. Babe Ruth lived around the corner, and the children used to chase his car for autographs.
'I must have been the classic nerd child,' Dr. Ostriker wrote in a memoir published in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2016. He first became interested in science when he was 4: His mother started reading science books aloud to get him to sit still for an oil portrait, and the readings stuck.
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Jerry Ostriker went to Harvard University, where he planned to study chemistry. Instead, he switched to physics, which appealed to what he called his 'cosmic perspective.'
Dr. Ostriker, in an image provided by Rebecca Ostriker, in Harvard Square in 1983.
REBECCA OSTRIKER/NYT
'I probably spent more time on literature than I spent on science,' he said in the oral history interview.
He soon began commuting to Brandeis University to visit Alicia Suskin, who was an aspiring artist and poet. They were married in 1958, while they were still undergraduates.
Alicia Ostriker, a professor emerita of English at Rutgers University, became an award-winning poet and has often written her husband into her work. In turn, he found poetry in astrophysics. 'As an astrophysicist, you get a perspective on humankind,' he said, describing it as 'sweating on this little grain of spinning sand.'
Dr. Ostriker, at his family's summer home in Chester, Mass., in 1987. His wife, Alicia, is in the background.
REBECCA OSTRIKER/NYT
In addition to his wife and his daughter Rebecca, an editor for the opinion section of The Boston Globe, Dr. Ostriker leaves two other children, Eve Ostriker, an astrophysicist at Princeton, and Gabriel Ostriker, a data engineer; a sister, Naomi Seligman; two brothers, Jon and David; and three grandchildren.
After graduating from Harvard in 1959, Dr. Ostriker worked at the Naval Research Laboratory for a year before enrolling in graduate school at the University of Chicago, splitting his time between the university's Yerkes Observatory and the physics department, where he worked under the future Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
He earned his doctorate in 1964. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Cambridge, where he rubbed elbows with future black hole eminences Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, Dr. Ostriker joined Princeton as a research scientist. He remained there for 47 years, rising through the ranks to become chair of the astronomy department and provost of the university.
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Dr. Ostriker wrote a series of papers that would lead astronomy to the dark side.
He wondered whether galaxies, like stars, could break apart if they rotated too fast. The question was particularly relevant to so-called disc galaxies like the Milky Way, which are shaped sort of like a fried egg, with a fat, yolky center surrounded by a thin, white flat of stars.
Working with Peebles, he constructed a computer simulation and found that disc galaxies were indeed unstable. They would fall apart unless there was something we couldn't see, a halo of some additional invisible mass, lending gravitational support.
Whatever this stuff called dark matter was — dim stars, black holes, rocks, exotic subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang — there could be a lot of it, as much as 10 times the mass of ordinary atomic matter.
It was one of the first theoretical arguments that there must be more to galaxies than could be seen in starlight. In the 1930s, astronomer Fritz Zwicky had suggested that most of the mass in galaxies was 'dark.' His idea was largely ignored until Dr. Ostriker and Peebles published their paper in 1973.
The reaction from the scientific community was predominantly hostile, Dr. Ostriker said. 'I couldn't see particularly why,' he said in the oral history. 'It was just a fact.'
A year later, incorporating more data from galaxy clusters and other star systems, he and his colleagues argued that, in fact, most of the mass in the universe was invisible.
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By the early 1980s, the idea of dark matter had become an accepted part of cosmology, but there remained conundrums, including calculations that suggested stars were older than the universe in which they lived.
The missing ingredient, Dr. Ostriker and theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt, then at the University of Pennsylvania, suggested in 1995, was a fudge factor known as the cosmological constant. Einstein had come up with this concept in 1917 but had later abandoned it, considering it a blunder.
As Steinhardt recalled, he and Dr. Ostriker were 'convinced that a universe with only dark and ordinary matter could not explain the existing observations.' But once they added the cosmological constant, everything came out right.
They were not the only ones with this idea. Cosmologists Michael Turner, now retired from the University of Chicago, and Lawrence Krauss, now retired from Arizona State University, also argued in favor of bringing back the constant. 'To say Jerry was a giant in the field is an understatement,' Turner wrote in an email, adding, 'Sparring with Jerry over science was a privilege and often a learning experience.'
Three years later, two competing teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was being accelerated by a 'dark energy' acting as the cosmological constant, pushing galaxies apart. The cosmological constant then became part of a standard model of the universe, as Dr. Ostriker and others had predicted.
Dr. Ostriker worked at Princeton for almost a half century, becoming chair of the astronomy department and provost of the university.
DENISE APPLEWHITE/PRINCETON UNIVERSITY/NYT
In another series of papers, he and various collaborators transformed astronomers' view of what was going on in the space between stars.
Dr. Ostriker and Renyue Cen, also of Princeton, concluded in 1999 that most ordinary atomic matter in the nearby universe was invisible, taking the form of intergalactic gas heated to millions of degrees by shock waves and explosions.
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At Princeton, Dr. Ostriker helped set up the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a collaboration aimed at remapping the entire sky in digital form with a dedicated telescope at Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, N.M.
'The survey is going to increase our knowledge and our understanding of the universe a hundredfold,' he told The New York Times in 1991. 'The map is not going to show us how the universe began, but it will show us the nature and origin of large-scale structure, the most interesting problem in astrophysics today. With an answer to this problem, we will be able to better approach the question of how it all began.'
The survey, started in 1998, is now in its fifth iteration and has generated some 10,000 research papers and archived measurements of a half-billion stars and galaxies, all free to any astronomer in the world.
As provost, Dr. Ostriker led the effort to vastly expand the university's financial aid program, changing many loans to grants that would not need to be repaid, making a Princeton education more egalitarian.
In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Clinton.
Dr. Ostriker retired from Princeton in 2012, just as his daughter Eve was joining the astronomy faculty there. He took a part-time position at Columbia University, returning to his childhood neighborhood.
'Growing up in New York City, I couldn't see the stars,' he once told the Times.
He found them anyway, and a whole lot more that we can't see with or without the glare of streetlights.
It was a passion that never waned. Encountered recently by a reporter on the sidewalk in front of Columbia, Dr. Ostriker launched into an enthusiastic description of a promising new theory of dark matter.
Early in 2023, by then ailing, he took to his bed at home. But he kept up with his research by email and had regular pizza lunches with colleagues.
Apprised recently of results from the James Webb Space Telescope that seemed to reinforce his ideas about dark matter, he wrote in an email to his colleagues, 'Keep up the good work.'
The dark universe he helped conjure half a century ago has developed a few small cracks, leading to new ideas about the nature of that dark matter.
'It's a very, very, very specific and clear theory. So therefore, God bless it, it can be wrong,' Dr. Ostriker said in a recent interview. 'That's the way science proceeds. And what we know about it is that it is a little bit wrong, not a lot wrong.'
Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge and the Astronomer Royal, summed up Dr. Ostriker's life this way: 'Some scientists come up with pioneering ideas on novel themes; others write definitive 'last words' on already-established topics. Jerry was in the first category.'
'He wrote among the earliest papers — now classics — on the nature of pulsars, the evidence for dark matter and on galaxy formation and cosmology. His flow of papers continued into his 80s,' Rees added. 'He enthusiastically engaged in new data and in computational techniques. He inspired younger colleagues and collaborators, not just at Princeton but around the world.'
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