Ken Freeman

Early Life

Imagine an infinity expanding mass going further and further into the dark reaches of space. Then imagine what is expanding it, what is pushing it further and further. Well, you are thinking of dark matter. Many people over the years made massive contributions to finding out what dark matter is and how it works and Ken freeman was one of those key people.

Kenneth Charles Freeman was born on the 27th of August, 1940 in Perth. His whole life Ken Freeman loved maths and he was good at it. When he went to the University of Western Australia, he started focusing on aerodynamics in maths and that eventually went on to become Astrophysics which in turn developed a deep interest in dark matter.

During university studying astronomy Ken made the first dynamic model of a barrel galaxy. And don’t forget he was still only a student which is very impressive. But this was not the only massive contribution he would make to astronomy.

Discoveries After University.

After he left university he came out with his first paper “On the Disks of Spiral and So Galaxies”. In this paper, he studied the rotation of 36 spiral galaxies and figured out that two had more matter than could be explained by their size which in turn suggested that there were some unseen components of matter aka dark matter. This changed the whole way we saw spiral galaxies and without Ken Freeman, we would never have known about it.

But this is not the end of what he discovered, oh no. In 2002, with J. Bland-Hawthorn, (another astronomer) he introduced the ideas of Galactic archaeology which in turn provided the foundation for a new era of massive spectroscopic star surveys that are happening right now in the US, Australia and in other places all over the world.

Later Life

But while he was doing this he was also training his own students. He acted as a supervisor for 60 PhD students and 12 postdocs. 5 of these students have gone on to win Hubble fellowships.

But after he did all of this you would think he would be travelling all over the world right? Well yes and no, there was always one place he would go back to no matter how far away from it he was and that was Mount Stromlo. He is now currently a Duffield professor at mount stromlo.

Conclusion

To conclude, Ken Freeman is an amazing astronomer and half the things we know about the infinitely expanding mass that is the universe would not be possible without him.

Bibliography

Edubilla:http://www.edubilla.com/award/gruber-prize-in-cosmolo gy/ken-freeman/

Australian academy of science:https://www.science.org.au/profile/ken-freeman

Life among the galaxy:https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/57/5/5.35/273 8844 Icrar:https://www.icrar.org/multimedia/interviews/professor-ken-f reeman/ Darkmatter/weebly:https://darkmatter2018.weebly.com/bio---ken -freeman.html Britannica:https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ken-Freeman

By Christian H

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