Jean-Pierre Luminet

Jean-Pierre Luminet
Jean-Pierre Luminet at Salon du Livre 2009 (Paris, France)
Born	(1951-06-03) June 3, 1951 France
Alma mater	Saint-Charles University of Marseilles Paris-Meudon Observatory Paris University (PhD)
Known for	First computer simulation of a black hole, Tidal disruption event
Scientific career
Fields	Astrophysics, cosmology
Institutions	CNRS Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille Laboratoire Univers et Théories
Thesis	(1977)
Doctoral advisor	Brandon Carter

Jean-Pierre Luminet (born 3 June 1951) is a French astrophysicist, specializing in relativistic astrophysics, black holes and cosmology. He is also a writer and a poet. As a scientist he is an emeritus research director at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). Dr. Luminet is a member of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTH) of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, and is a visiting scientist at the Centre de Physique Théorique (CPT) in Marseilles.

He has been awarded several prizes on account of his work in pure science and science communication. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of Inference: The International Review of Science.

The asteroid 5523 Luminet, discovered in 1991 at Palomar Observatory, was aptly named after him.

Luminet endeavors to make his research understandable to the non-scientific community. He has produced fifteen science books, seven historical novels, TV documentaries, and six poetry collections. He is an artist, an engraver, a sculptor and a musician and Hèctor Parra. Luminet's literary work has been translated into a dozen languages .

Scientific career

In 1976, after studying Mathematics at the Saint-Charles University of Marseilles, he moved to Paris-Meudon Observatory to undertake a Ph.D. with Brandon Carter as his advisor. After a few months spent at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge, England, where he met Stephen Hawking, in 1977, he defended his Ph.D. thesis at Paris University on the subject of Singularities in Cosmology. In 1979, Luminet got a permanent research position at the CNRS and developed his scientific activities at Paris Observatory until 2014, before joining the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille. During the interval, he was a visiting scientist at the University of São Paulo, Brazil (1984 and 1988), at the University of Berkeley, California (1989–1990) and a visiting astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, Chile (2005).

File:Luminet's Simulation of a Black Hole Accretion Disk.jpg

First computer simulation of a black hole with a thin accretion disk, calculated by J.-P. Luminet in 1978 (ref. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 75, 228, 1979)

The first direct image of a black hole, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope and published in April 2019

In 1979, Luminet created the first "image" of a black hole with an accretion disk, using nothing but an early computer, math, and India ink, predicting that it could apply to the supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy M87. In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope Consortium confirmed Luminet's predictions by providing the first telescopic image of the shadow of the M87* black hole and of its accretion disk.

In 1982, along with physicist Brandon Carter, Luminet invented the concept of Tidal disruption event, namely the destruction of a star passing in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. They showed that this phenomenon could result in the violent destruction of the star in the form of a "stellar pancake", causing a reactivation of nuclear reactions in the core of the star in the stage of its maximum compression. With other collaborators, Luminet later developed the model of tidal destruction, predicting specific observational signatures and introducing the concept of “tidal supernovae”. Finally, the theory of TDE was confirmed by the observation of spectacular eruptions resulting from the accretion of stellar debris by a massive object located in the heart of Active Galactic Nuclei such as NGC 5128 or NGC 4438, and even explains the superluminous supernova SN 2015L, better known by the code name ASASSN-15lh, interpreted as the tidal explosion of a white dwarf just before being absorbed beneath the horizon of a massive black hole.

In 1995, with his colleague Marc Lachièze-Rey, Luminet coined the term "Cosmic Topology" for describing the shape of space, proposing a variety of multiply-connected universe models compatible with the standard Friedmann-Lemaître models of relativistic cosmology.

In 2003, large scale anomalies in the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background observed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe led to the suggestion, by Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Observatoire de Paris and colleagues, that the shape of the universe is a finite dodecahedron, attached to itself by each pair of opposite faces to form a Poincaré homology sphere. During the following years, astronomers searched for more evidence to support this hypothesis but found none.

Jean-Pierre Luminet is also a specialist in the history of cosmology and in particular the emergence of the concept of the Big Bang, emphasizing in several books and articles the leading role played by the Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître. In 2018, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) recommended that the so-called Hubble's law – which relates to the Universe's expansion and underpins modern cosmology – now be known as the Hubble-Lemaître law.

Now working with Quantum Gravity Theories, Luminet published a critical analysis of the Holographic principle and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Artistic activities

• In the field of visual arts, Luminet is devoted to drawing, engraving (learned with Jean Delpech at Ecole Polytechnique), and sculpture. A thorough analysis of his artwork has been done by Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at Oxford University.

• In the field of music, Luminet collaborated in 1991 with Gérard Grisey (a former pupil of Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux) to produce a piece of cosmic music called Le Noir de l’Étoile (The Black of the Star). This work for six percussionists, based on magnetic tape and astronomical signals coming from [[pulsar|pulsars,]] has become a classic of contemporary music and is regularly performed around the world.

In 2011, he began a collaboration with Hèctor Parra, who composed the orchestral piece Caressant l’horizon (Caressing the Horizon) inspired by Luminet's books. In 2017, Luminet wrote the scenario for Parra's Inscape. Composed of an ensemble of 16 soloists, large orchestra, and electronics, the piece describes an Utopian voyage through a giant black hole. It was created in 2018 in Barcelona, Paris, and Köln.

• In 1998, Luminet was a curator of the exhibition Figures du Ciel (Figures of Heaven), coupled to the opening of the new Bibliothèque nationale de France (October 1998- January 1999)

Honors and recognition

Luminet has received more than twenty prizes and honors, including:

• 1999 ― the asteroid 5523 Luminet was named after him

Selected publications

Popular science books (in French)

• 1987 Les Trous Noirs (ISBN 2-02-015948-1)
• 1994 La Physique et l'infini with Marc Lachièze-Rey (ISBN 2-08-035183-4)
• 1998 Figures du Ciel with Marc Lachièze-Rey (ISBN 2-02-030768-5)
• 1999 Eclipses, les rendez-vous célestes with Serge Brunier (ISBN 2-04-727256-4)
• 2002 Le Feu du ciel : météores et astéroïdes tueurs (ISBN 2-7491-0030-5)
• 2004 L'invention du Big Bang (ISBN 2-02-061148-1)
• 2005 L'Univers chiffonné (ISBN 2-07-030052-8)
• 2005 De l'infini with Marc Lachièze-Rey (ISBN 2-10-048674-8)
• 2006 Le destin de l'univers : Trous noirs et énergie sombre (ISBN 2-213-63081-X)
• 2009 Bonnes nouvelles des étoiles with Élisa Brune (ISBN 978-2-7381-2287-2)
• 2011 Illuminations (ISBN 978-2-7381-2562-0)
• 2012 Astéroïdes : la Terre en danger (ISBN 978-2-7491-1779-9)
• 2015 L’univers en 100 questions (ISBN 979-1-0210-1654-5)
• 2016 Dialogues sous le ciel étoilé with H. Reeves (ISBN 978-2221157305)
• 2016 De l’infini – horizons cosmiques, multivers et vide quantique (augmented edition) with M. Lachièze-Rey (ISBN 978-2100794553)
• 2019 Chroniques de l'espace (ISBN 978-2749162485)
• 2020 : L’écume de l’espace-temps (ISBN 978-2738139719)

Popular science books (in English)

• 1992 Black Holes (revised edition), Cambridge University Press
• 2001 Glorious Eclipses (with Serge Brunier), Cambridge University Press
• 2001 Celestial Treasury (with M. Lachièze-Rey), Cambridge University Press
• 2008 The Wraparound Universe, New York, AK Peters

Novels and poetry (in French)

• 1993 Noir soleil (ISBN 978-2-86274-275-5)
• 1996 Les poètes et l'Univers, Éditions le cherche-midi (ISBN 978-2-86274-473-5)
• 1999 Le Rendez-vous de Vénus (ISBN 978-2-7096-2025-3)
• 2004 Itinéraire céleste (ISBN 978-2-7491-0263-4)
• 2002 Le Bâton d'Euclide (ISBN 978-2-253-11471-0)
• 2006 Les bâtisseurs du ciel, Tome 1, Le secret de Copernic (ISBN 978-2-7096-2596-8)
• 2008 Les bâtisseurs du ciel, Tome 2, La discorde céleste: Kepler et le trésor de Tycho Brahé (ISBN 978-2-7096-2567-8)
• 2009 Les bâtisseurs du ciel, Tome 3, L'œil de Galilée (ISBN 978-2-7096-2902-7)
• 2010 Les bâtisseurs du ciel, Tome 4, La Perruque de Newton (ISBN 978-2-7096-2415-2)
• 2012 La Nature des choses, Éditions le cherche-midi (ISBN 978-2-7491-2727-9)
• 2014 Un trou énorme dans le ciel, Éditions Bruno Doucey (ISBN 978-2-362-29058-9)
• 2015 Ulugh Beg, L'astronome de Samarcande, Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès (ISBN 978-2-253-06787-0)

See also

• Physical Cosmology
• List of cosmologists
• Non-standard cosmology
• Timeline of cosmology

Sources

• J.-P. Luminet, I mage of a spherical black hole with thin accretion disk, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 75, 228-235 (1979)
• B. Carter & J.-P. Luminet, Pancake detonation of stars by black holes in galactic nuclei, Nature, 296, 212-214 (1982)
• J.-P. Luminet & B. Carter, Dynamics of an Affine Star Model in a Black Hole Tidal Field, Astrophys.J.Suppl. 61, 219-248 (1986)
• M. Lachièze-Rey & J.-P. Luminet, Cosmic topology, Physics Reports, 254, 135-214 (1996)
• J.-P. Luminet et al., Dodecahedral space topology as an explanation for weak wide-angle temperature correlations in the cosmic microwave background, 2003.
• J.-P. Luminet : Interstellar Science, Inference : International Review of Science vol.1 n°2 (March 2015)
• J.-P. Luminet : Cosmic Topology, Scholarpedia, 10(8):31544 (2015)
• J.-P. Luminet : The Holographic Universe, Inference (2)1, (2016)
• J.-P. Luminet : An Illustrated History of Black Hole Imaging : Personal Recollections (1972-2002), (2019)

External links

• Jean-Pierre Luminet Personal page at LUTH
• Luminesciences, Jean-Pierre Luminet blog in English on Futura-Sciences
• The youtube channel of J.-P. Luminet with more than 300 videos of conferences and interviews.
• Jean-Pierre Luminet at IMDb
• Bringing Black Holes down to Earth, in European Science Awards 2007
• Getting to know Jean-Pierre Luminet in European Science and Technology, issue 10 (2011)
• Inference: The International Review of Science