|
Dr. Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri is an astronomer
(première classe) at Paris
Observatory in France. His main field of research
is the formation and evolution of massive stars.
These hot, luminous stars, which have masses over
10 times that of our Sun, include the O-type stars,
Wolf-Rayet stars, and the so-called transition objects
(Ofpe/WN9, LBV, B[e], etc.). The formation process
is still a largely unsolved problem. Since they
evolve so rapidly, it is necessary to study them
at their earliest phases when they are still within
their enshrouding material.
Dr. Heydari-Malayeri started his search for the
youngest massive stars in the Magellanic Clouds,
our neighboring galaxies, almost two decades ago,
by conducting ground-based observations at the European
Southern Observatory. In 1982, this led him
to the discovery of a distinct and very rare class
of compact H II regions, called ``blobs.'' In contrast
to the typical H II regions of the Magellanic Clouds,
which are extended structures (sizes of several
arc minutes on the sky, corresponding to more than
150 light-years, powered by a large number of hot
stars), the blobs are very dense and small regions
(about 5 to 10 arc-seconds in diameter, corresponding
to 5 to 10 light-years). These are in fact sites
of young massive stars just leaving their pre-natal
molecular cloud. The recent use of the Hubble telescope
has been fundamental in penetrating into these compact
objects and studying the hidden newborn stars.
Mohammad was born in 1947 in Malayer, a small city
situated at 1700 m above sea level in the Zagros
mountains of Iran, some 400 kilometers southwest
of Tehran. He lived there with his family until
the age of eight. The starry night skies of Malayer
were perhaps the seeds of his fascination with the
stars. He was only 4-5 years old when he started
learning poems of the great Iranian poets by heart.
He lived in a large family with his great-grandfather,
who had a passion for poetry and could recite hundreds
of verses of Ferdowsi, Hafez, Khayyam, and Rumi
from memory, even though he was in his 80s. He still
remembers how all family members were sometimes
awakened by his great-grandfather during the night
because he had forgotten some verses and needed
help. His great-grandfather couldn't sleep till
somebody had found the lacking verse!
After his parents moved to the capital Tehran,
he continued watching the stars, searching for the
constellations and recognizing the bright stars
and nebulae with the help of a small binocular.
Years later, as a university student, he translated
and published several popular books in physics and
astronomy, including George Gamow's A Star Called
the Sun (Viking Press, New York, 1964) from
English into his mother tongue Persian (Tehran,
1972). He obtained his B.Sc. in Physics from Tehran
University in 1970 and did a compulsory two-year
military service. After six months at the imperial
army's artillery faculty in Ispahan studying surveying
and cartography, he became a lieutenant. Later every
time his division was out in desert for military
exercises, he used the fairly powerful surveying
telescopes to show the stars and galaxies to his
colleagues and soldiers.
In 1975 he was awarded a scholarship by the French
government to study astrophysics in France. He earned
his Doctorat d'Etat in astrophysics at Paris VII
University in 1983 after receiving his Doctorat
de Troisième Cycle in astrophysics in 1979
at the same institution. Both dissertations dealt
with several aspects of the interstellar medium,
particularly H II regions and molecular clouds.
He then spent seven years (from 1985 to 1992) as
a staff astronomer at the European
Southern Observatory, La
Silla, in Chile. At that period, even though
he continued his own research projects, he became
deputy director of the astronomy department (1989-1992)
and was in charge of a multiple-object spectrograph
(Optopus) at the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6-m telescope.
He has kept a sweet memory of living and working
in Chile. He is now a French citizen and lives in
Paris with his wife Soheila Faramarzi and their
two daughters Pegah (Melanie), 17 years, and Chirine,
12 years.
Outside astronomy Mohammad is interested in linguistics
and etymology, especially scientific terminology.
He has contributed to a scientific terminology system
in Persian which, like Greek and Latin, is an Indo-European
language. His method uses the roots, prefixes, and
affixes to coin Persian counterparts for new technical
words. If the necessary roots and affixes do not
exist in modern Persian, he goes back to the middle
and old Persian and Avestan as well as to Sanskrit,
Greek, or Latin to retrieve them. The international
terms are adopted and grammatically treated as Persian.
The whole procedure is quite complex and the final
results should comply with aesthetic criteria. He
is now working on an English-Persian Dictionary
of Astronomy and Astrophysics in which he proposes
Persian equivalents for the latest astrophysical
concepts and for classical terms as well.
|
