lit a candle 3h ago1964. He and Novikov said the afterglow of the Big Bang could be measured. Read that in a library in Iowa once and couldn't stop thinking about it. 89 years old.
Their story
Andrei Georgievich Doroshkevich was a Soviet and Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist whose work helped lay the foundations of modern cosmology. In 1964, with Igor Novikov, he set out the theoretical case that the universe should be filled with a measurable background of microwave radiation, the cosmic microwave background. He…
Andrei Georgievich Doroshkevich was a Soviet and Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist whose work helped lay the foundations of modern cosmology. In 1964, with Igor Novikov, he set out the theoretical case that the universe should be filled with a measurable background of microwave radiation, the cosmic microwave background. He spent decades at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and died on 26 October 2026, aged 89.
He was born on 22 January 1937 and studied at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. He became the first graduate student and one of the closest collaborators of the physicist Yakov Zeldovich, a central figure in Soviet cosmology.
His paper with Novikov, published in 1964 in the journal of the USSR Academy of Sciences, estimated the mean density of radiation in the universe and pointed out that the relic radiation left over from the hot early universe should be detectable with existing radio equipment. A signal of this kind had in fact been recorded by T. A. Shmaonov in 1957, but that work had been forgotten. The Doroshkevich and Novikov paper also remained largely unknown in the West until after Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the radiation in 1965, a discovery later recognised with the Nobel Prize.
Working alongside Zeldovich, Doroshkevich made major contributions to the theory of how the large scale structure of the universe formed. His studies of the flattened structures known as Zeldovich pancakes and of the statistics of gravitational instability became standard references. His 1970 paper on the spatial structure of perturbations and the origin of galactic rotation, a 1978 paper with Zeldovich and Rashid Sunyaev on fluctuations in the microwave background, and a 1980 computer simulation of structure formation in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society were among his best known works. He earned his doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences in 1978 with a dissertation on the development of large scale structure and the formation of galaxies in an expanding universe, and he wrote more than 200 scientific papers.
At the Lebedev Physical Institute he was a chief researcher and head of the department of theoretical astrophysics, and for many years he led theoretical research at its Astro Space Center, where a generation of scientists trained under him. In later years he worked on methods for analysing maps of the cosmic microwave background, including the Gauss Legendre sky pixelization scheme published in 2005.
The directorate of the Astro Space Center announced his death on 27 October 2026, describing him as an outstanding scientist and teacher and a man of exceptional decency, generosity and nobility. No cause of death was made public. A farewell ceremony was arranged for 28 October 2026 in Moscow.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Lebedev Physical Institute.
Photos
1Andrei Doroshkevich at the Zeldovich-100 conference in Minsk, 2014
by People Forever
