Carl Sagan — astronomer (cosmos) with roots in the Russian Empire
Carl Edward Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst neighbourhood of Brooklyn on 9 November 1934. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father.
Samuel Sagan (1905-1979) was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, and emigrated to New York, where he worked in the garment industry. Sagan's mother, Rachel Molly Gruber (1906-1982), was born in New York; her own father came from Sasiv near Lviv, which was in Austrian Galicia and is not part of the Russian connection. Carl was named after her mother, Chaiya Clara, who had died giving birth to her second child. Sagan traced his sense of wonder to his father, who in his spare time helped ease disputes between workers and management in the garment trade, and his analytical bent to his mother.
He studied at the University of Chicago, taught at Harvard, and in 1971 became a full professor at Cornell, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He worked on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo missions, argued that the high surface temperature of Venus is explained by a greenhouse effect, and assembled the first physical messages sent beyond the solar system: the plaque carried by Pioneer 10 in 1972 and the Golden Record on the Voyager probes in 1977. He later proposed the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1.
One of his early books was a collaboration across the Cold War. The Soviet astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky had written a book on life in the universe; Sagan expanded it with extensive annotations for its English edition, published in 1966 as Intelligent Life in the Universe, and the two authors met in person only later, when Shklovsky was able to travel to New York.
The Dragons of Eden won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1978, and the television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), which he co-wrote and presented, won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles, and co-founded The Planetary Society, which he served as president.
He died in Seattle on 20 December 1996, aged sixty-two. The following year NASA renamed the Mars Pathfinder landing site the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.
"Father Samuel Sagan (1905-1979) emigrated to New York from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, and worked in the garment industry."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kamianets-Podilskyi, Podolia Governorate (now Ukraine)
His father, Samuel Sagan, was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, and emigrated to New York, where he worked in the garment industry. His mother's father came from Sasiv, in Austrian Galicia.
Father Samuel Sagan, garment worker, born in Kamianets-Podilskyi (Russian Empire). Mother Rachel Molly Gruber (1906-1982), born in New York; her father came from Sasiv near Lviv, in Austrian Galicia.
.svg?width=900)
Kamianets-Podilskyi, Podolia Governorate (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.