Jerome Kristian

He was the first to provide observational support for the now widely accepted theory that quasars are supermassive black holes at the center of distant galaxies.

[6] On August 27, 1955, Kristian married Mary Jeanes, a fellow Shimer student who had also moved to the University of Texas, in her case to pursue advanced study in Spanish.

[5] His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Hydromagnetic Equilibrium of a Fluid Sphere" and supervised by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was split into three separate papers and published in The Astrophysical Journal in 1963 and 1964.

"[10] 1963 also saw the publication of a key work by Boris Trakhtenbrot, Algorithms and Automatic Computing Machines, which Kristian had cotranslated with James McCawley and Samuel Schmitt.

[8] His work, chiefly done in collaboration with Allan Sandage and James Westphal, focused on the optical identification of radio-wave sources such as pulsars and quasars.

In 1973, Kristian photographed 26 low-redshift quasars and confirmed for the first time the presence of optical "fuzz" around them, indicating galaxies which were too faint to be identified directly.

"[16] On June 22, 1996, Kristian drowned when his ultralight aircraft crashed into the Santa Clara River after clipping a nearby power line.