Jan Arvid Högbom (born 3 October 1929) is a Swedish radio astronomer and astrophysicist.

Education

Högbom obtained his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1959 from the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

with

Martin Ryle Sir Martin Ryle (27 September 1918 – 14 October 1984) was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems (see e.g. aperture synthesis) and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sourc ...

Career and research

Högbom is most well known for the development of the CLEAN algorithm for

deconvolution In mathematics, deconvolution is the inverse of convolution. Both operations are used in signal processing and image processing. For example, it may be possible to recover the original signal after a filter (convolution) by using a deconvolution ...

of images created in

radio astronomy Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies Astronomical object, celestial objects using radio waves. It started in 1933, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories reported radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observat ...

, published in 1974. This allows the use of arrays of small antennae, generating incomplete sampling data, to effectively simulate a much larger aperture. Högbom was also the first to use Earth rotation synthesis imaging in a small test. These methods pioneered by Högbom are still extensively used and combined, e.g. in the imaging of the central supermassive

black hole A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. Th ...

of the

Messier 87 Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a Type-cD galaxy, supergiant elliptical galaxy, elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo (constellation), Virgo that contains several trillion s ...

galaxy.

Awards and honours

Högbom was elected member of the

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences () is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special responsibility for promoting nat ...

in 1981.

References

20th-century Swedish astronomers Alumni of the University of Cambridge {{DEFAULTSORT:Högbom, Jan 1929 births Living people Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Radio astronomers