Academician Alexei Starobinsky, co -author of the theory of accelerated expansion in the early universe, died

At the age of 75, the physicist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexei Starobinsky, died. This was announced by the administration of the Landau Theoretical Physics Institute, where the scientist worked.

Starobinsky died on December 21. The institute did not report the causes of his death.

“The great scientist, our employee Academician Alexei Aleksandrovich Starobinsky, suddenly died. This is a huge loss for us. We will maintain a bright memory of him, ”the institute said in a statement.

Alexey Starobinsky is one of the world's largest theoretic physicists. He was engaged in cosmology, astrophysics, and also wrote several gravity works.

In 1979, Starobinsky published a work that paved the path of inflation theory in the early Universe, subsequently developed by Alan Gut, Stephen Hawking, Vyacheslav Mukhanov, Gennady Chibis and other cosmologists. The problem, which was most acute at that moment in cosmology, was inexplicable similarities, the homogeneity of the universe on the largest scale - more than the size of the accumulations of galaxies.

Observations showed that the areas of space, which, due to the expansion of the Universe during the Great Explosion, were not able to interact with each other, nevertheless, were very similar to each other in structure and density of the substance, and this required a separate explanation. During the solution to this problem, Alan Gut proposed the theory of inflation, which postulates the accelerated expansion of the universe at the earliest moments of its existence and explains this paradox.

Aleksey Starobinsky a year before Gut proposed a modification of the general theory of relativity of Einstein, which showed the possibility of such accelerated expansion, and, in addition, predicted the emergence of cosmological gravitational waves during this process, the search for which is conducted today by several astrophysical projects.

The publication “Scientific Russia” writes , “The discovery is considered the most important in theoretical physics, no one was able to look so far into the past of the world. His departure is a huge loss for the domestic and world scientific community, ”the newspaper writes.

Starobinsky’s works on rotating black holes anticipated a number of ideas of Stephen Hawking, with whom the Russian scientist met at international conferences several times.

In addition to the Russian Academy of Sciences, the scientist was a member of the German National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldin” and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and also worked as an invited researcher in several scientific centers around the world. Among the awards that Starobinsky received, the Kavli Awards of the Norwegian Academy of Natural and Humanities are the highest award in world astrophysicist, “Scientific Russia” notes.

In February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Strobinsky was among the scientists who signed an open letter against the war.