A renowned Caltech astronomer who studied distant exoplanets was shot and killed outside his home in a rural area near Los Angeles, the LA Times reported.
Carl Grillmair, 67, was pronounced dead by paramedics at the scene after deputies responded to a 911 call in the unincorporated community of Llano in Antelope Valley. A medical examiner ruled his death a homicide caused by a gunshot wound to the torso.
The LA County Sheriff’s department said it arrested a suspect, Freddy Snyder, 29, in a nearby carjacking while investigating the shooting. Snyder was charged Wednesday with Grillmair’s murder, along with burglary and carjacking. It’s unclear if Snyder had any relation with Grillmair.
Grillmair, a member of Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, better known as IPAC, had spent more than four decades studying distant exoplanets and the structures that make up our galaxy.
As a principal investigator on NASA’s Hubble space telescope and NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, one of his foremost interests was the lambent of arcs of streaking stars called stellar streams that swirl around the outskirts of the Milky Way. The motions of stellar streams contain clues to how our barred spiral galaxy evolved over billions of years, including through collisions with other galactic realms.
Among his most notable contributions to the field was leading research published in 2007 that, for the first time, captured enough light from distant exoplanets to identify the molecules in their atmospheres. The discovery was made using the Spitzer telescope, an infrared observatory, while studying a “hot Jupiter,” the name for a Jupiter-like gas giant that orbits extremely close to its star. Groundbreaking as the work was, Grillmair and the community had anticipated detecting water, yet found none.
Grillmair persevered, however, and soon made the “monumental” discovery of detecting signs of water on another planet, IPAC astronomer Sergio Fajardo-Acosta, who worked alongside Grillmair at Caltech for 26 years, reminisced in an interview with The Guardian. The detection earned him NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement in 2011.
Fajardo-Acosta said that in his free time, Grillmair flew airplanes over the desert and worked on home improvement projects. He chose to live in California’s remote Antelope valley so he could easily study the stars at night in his own home, where he kept a personal observatory.
Fajardo-Acosta and other colleagues mourned Grillmair’s passing.
“It was always a pleasure to experience Carl’s creativity in doing science,” he said in a statement shared with Caltech. “His methods on exoplanets and galactic structure studies were truly detective work, allowing him to infer events that took place many billions of years ago.”
“He was part of IPAC’s bedrock for many years, and his passing impacts all of us across IPAC,” Tom Greene, IPAC’s executive director and a research professor of astronomy, said in a the Caltech statement.
Grillmair’s death follows another slaying of a prominent scientist. In December, Nuno Loureiro, a MIT physicist who was considered a leader in his field of nuclear fusion, was shot and killed in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. The suspected killer, Neves Valente, was a former physics student who attended the same university program in Portugal as Loureiro over two decades before. Days before killing his former classmate, Valente carried out a horrific mass shooting at Brown University, killing two students, and was later found dead in an apparent suicide after a days-long manhunt.
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