Margaret Geller Biography

Margaret Joan Geller is an American astrophysicist born December 8, 1947 in Ithaca, New York. She was encouraged by her mother, Sarah Levine Geller, to study science and mathematics. Geller did not receive any specialized education until she was in college. In 1970, Geller received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. The second university she would attend would be Princeton, where she would spend four years until she received her Ph.D. in Physics. After graduating she moved to Cambridge, England to study at the Institute of Astronomy. In 1980, she moved back to the United States of America to become an assistant professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. It was at this time where she and John P. Huchra, a coworker, began carrying out a red-shift survey for the Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The survey's purpose was to map all galaxies above a certain brightness at a maximum distance of 650 million light years in a particular part of the sky. According to the Big Bang Theory the sky should be homogeneous and uniform in the distribution of galaxies, but that is not what Geller observed. She first observed this in the constellation Bootes in 1981. There was a 100 million light year gap between galaxies in the area. After being an assistant professor for two years, she joined the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory as a permanent scientific staff. In 1988, she became the head professor for Astronomy at Harvard University. Up until the 1990s, she continued her survey of galaxies with Huchra. Their first published observations of a 135 degree slice of the sky showed a thin layer of galaxies that appeared to line the walls of a "bubble-like" empty space. They would later call this the "Great Wall." This wall of galaxies is five times denser than the average density of galaxies spread out across the sky. What blew the minds of Geller and Huchra was the fact that the wall was only 15 million light years thick compared to it's 500 million light years in length. Even though they discovered this phenomena, they were not able to explain it. One theory is that areas in space before the Big Bang were "clumpy," so when the the Big Bang occurred they were distributed unevenly. Another theory is that unusually high amounts of dark matter hold the galaxies in place. Even though they continue to survey the sky, they still do not know how to explain this phenomena.

In 1990, she won the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; two of her most important awards. Her most recent and notable award is the 2014 Karl Schwarzchild Medal of the German Astronomical Society. To this day she continues to study galaxies and their evolution and she has taken up an interest in X-ray astronomy.