Rashid Sunyaev

Rashid Sunyaev (born March 1, 1943, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, U.S.S.R. [now in Uzbekistan]) is a Russian-German astrophysicist who, with Soviet physicist Yakov Zeldovich, first proposed the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, in which distortions in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are caused by clusters of galaxies. With Russian astrophysicist Nikolay Shakura, he also developed the Shakura-Sunyaev model, which describes the accretion of matter onto a black hole.

Sunyaev received a master’s degree in physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1966 and a doctorate in astrophysics from Moscow State University in 1968. From 1968 to 1974 he was a scientific researcher at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences) in Moscow. Sunyaev was head of the Laboratory for Theoretical Astrophysics at the Space Research Institute of the U.S.S.R Academy of Sciences from 1974 to 1982, and he was head of the high-energy astrophysics department there from 1982 to 2002. He was in charge of Kvant, an X-ray observatory that was launched to the Soviet space station Mir in 1987 and made the first X-ray observations of a supernova (SN 1987A) that year. Sunyaev also led the Granat mission, an orbiting X-ray and gamma-ray telescope that was launched in 1989. From 1975 to 2001 he was a professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1992 he became chief scientist at the Space Research Institute, and in 1995 he also joined the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, where he became director in 1996. At that time Sunyaev acquired dual Russian-German citizenship.

As a graduate student, Sunyaev was initially interested in particle physics, but after meeting Zeldovich in 1965, he began working in astrophysics. Sunyaev’s important early work concentrated on using the CMB (electromagnetic radiation that is a residual effect of the big bang) to uncover the early history of the universe. In 1970 Sunyaev and Zeldovich predicted the existence of baryon acoustic oscillations, regions of dense gas where galaxies would have formed in the early universe and that would appear as brightness fluctuations in the CMB. These oscillations were first observed in 2001 by balloon-based microwave detectors. In 1972 Sunyaev and Zeldovich described the SZ effect, a phenomenon in which electrons in a galaxy cluster would collide with CMB photons, boosting the energy of the photons and raising their frequency. Thus, at certain radio frequencies, the galaxy clusters would appear as shadows against the CMB. The SZ effect was first observed in 1984 and is used to find extremely distant galaxy clusters.

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In the early 1970s, Sunyaev became interested in astronomical X-ray sources. He and Shakura in 1973 described the physics of matter falling on the accretion disk around a black hole. The Shakura-Sunyaev model became the basis for much of the subsequent theoretical work that described cataclysmic variable stars and quasars.

Sunyaev was the recipient of numerous honours, including the Crafoord Prize (2008) and the Kyoto Prize (2011). In addition, he won a share of the Dirac Medal in 2019.