Alar Toomre

Following the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1944, Toomre and his family fled to Germany; they emigrated to the United States in 1949.

He received an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering and Physics from MIT in 1957[2][4] and then studied at the University of Manchester on a Marshall Scholarship where he obtained a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics.

[5] After spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study,[7] he returned again to MIT as part of the faculty, where he stayed.

[11] Toomre conducted the first computer simulations of galaxy mergers in the 1970s with his brother Jüri, an astrophysicist and solar physicist.

[25] In 1993, Toomre received the Dirk Brouwer Award which recognizes "outstanding contributions to the field of Dynamical Astronomy".

The results of the Toomre brothers' simulations of the Antennae Galaxies
The Antennae Galaxies by Brad Whitmore (STScI), and NASA