Who was Margherita Hackpioneer of Italian science, passed away at the age of 91 in 2013? A woman who lived through the twentieth century, managing to establish herself in an environment, that of research, which had been closed to women for centuries, and a militant scientist who loved dissemination and political commitment. The Florentine astrophysicist, who had chosen Trieste as her city of choice, now told by fiction tv “Margherita delle stelle” broadcast on Rai 1, she was born in Florence in 1922the year of the March on Rome and the advent of fascism.
Cristiana Capotondi is the astrophysicist Hack in the TV film ‘Daisy of the Stars’
edited by the Spettacoli editorial team
The father, of Swiss origins, anti-fascist and Protestant, was removed from his job as an accountant due to his political positions and then fired. Her mother, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, made copies of Uffizi paintings for tourists to support her family. After classical high school, he first enrolled in the faculty of literature, then in physics: in those years he met Giorgio Abetti, director of the Arcetri observatory, who was important in directing his passion for the stars, both a student of letters, Aldo De Rosa, who he married in 1944, right near the Arcetri Observatory. The following year, in 1945, he graduated in astrophysics with a thesis on the properties of a class of variable stars, the Cepheids, in particular on a star called FF Aquilae.
After a period of work in Milan, in an optics company, he returned to Florence, winning a competition for assistant astronomer. He thus continued his observations on the Cepheids and on stars of spectral type Be. Assistant professor of astronomy since 1950, he moved to Paris for a period to work with Daniel Chalonge at the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris.
Having obtained his teaching qualification in 1954, he began to write a scientific popularization column for the New Courier of Florence; he asked for and obtained a transfer to the Merate Observatory (Brera branch), holding courses in astrophysics and radio astronomy at the Physics Institute of the University of Milan. In the meantime he was also researching and teaching abroad, from Berkeley to Princeton, from Mexico City to Ankara in Turkey. In the 1964 won the competition for the chair of astronomy atUniversity of Triesteand was the first woman to direct an astronomical observatory in Italy.
She also created the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Trieste, which later became a department in 1985 and directed by herself until 1990. She retired from work in 1997, without ever ceasing her work of scientific dissemination. She was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the International Union of Astronomers and the Royal Astronomical Society. Militant atheist, due to her political commitment, upon her death the newspaper Il manifesto di lei honored her with the title Red Star: she was in fact nominated (and elected, but leaving the seat) several times in the ranks of the Italian Communist Party.
#Margherita #Hack #astrophysicist #discoveries
– 2024-03-16 06:42:41
