Edward Anders
The Chicago cosmochemist whose table of Solar System element abundances became a standard, and whose team first found stardust older than the Sun in meteorites.
Key facts
- Born
- 1926
- Died
- 2025
- Nationality
- Latvian-born American
- Field
- Cosmochemist
Edward Anders was born in Liepāja, Latvia, into a Jewish family. During the Second World War he and his mother survived the Holocaust by living under false identities. After the war he studied in Germany and the United States and joined the University of Chicago in 1955, where he spent most of his career.
Anders measured trace elements and noble gases in meteorites with great precision. He used them to understand how meteorites formed, how the Moon was bombarded, and how Earth gained its volatile elements. With Nicolas Grevesse he published in 1989 a table of the abundances of the elements in the Solar System, based on CI chondrites and the Sun. It became one of the most cited works in all of the Earth and space sciences.
For years his group puzzled over strange noble gases in carbonaceous chondrites. They dissolved meteorites in acids until only a tiny residue remained, and in 1987 they found the carriers: nanometre-sized diamonds, and later grains of silicon carbide and graphite. These grains are presolar, made around other stars before the Sun was born and preserved in meteorites. Anders described the method as burning down the haystack to find the needle.
He retired to California in 1991 and lived to 98. An asteroid is named after him.
On the timeline
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The Murchison meteoriteThe Allende meteorite