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Gerrit L. Verschuur (born in 1937 in Cape Town, South Africa) is an American scientist who is best known for his work in radio astronomy. Though a pioneer in that field, Verschuur is also an author (he has written about astronomy, natural disasters, and ), inventor, adjunct professor of physics for the University of Memphis, and Astronomer Emeritus - Arecibo Observatory and now semi-retired. He served for a time as the Chief Scientist for Translucent Technologies, LLC; a company which is based in Memphis, Tennessee. Uncommonly Lakeland
In 1992 Verschuur became a resident of the City of Lakeland, which is located in Shelby County, Tennessee, northwest of Memphis. In 2001 Verschuur was elected, and served a four-year term as commissioner. In 2007 he was elected again and served for a total of 10 years. In Lakeland, Verschuur was also the President of the Garner Lake Association. Since 1986 he has been married to Dr. Joan Schmelz, a fellow scientist whose specialty is solar astronomy, specifically . Women in science – Earth and Space – Dr. Joan T. Schmelz Verschuur has one son who lives in England.
During his years living beside the lake in Lakeland he made a fundamental discovery concerning the manner in which light interacts with a so-called Secchi Disk that is used to measure the transparency of lake and ocean waters. The disk had been invented in the mid-nineteenth century by a Jesuit priest (Angela Secchi) but no one before Verschuur had understand the optics underlying the measurement technique.
Verschuur has taught at the University of Manchester, Rhodes University, the universities of Colorado and Maryland, UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley, among others. ( See: Verschuur) He has been an annual speaker at Mid-South Stargaze, "the annual amateur astronomers conference and star party held at Rainwater Observatory in French Camp, Mississippi." Mid-South Star Gaze In 1971 Verschuur was hired as the first Director of Fiske Planetarium for the University of Colorado at Boulder, History // Fiske Planetarium and in 1980 he worked with Dr. John C. Lilly.
In his primary field of study Verschuur "pioneered the measurement of the interstellar magnetic field using the hydrogen line Zeeman effect technique." A thing which, according to Virginia Trimble, for the first time allowed to "measure magnetic strengths and their place-to-place variations with some confidence."http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/26/1/26-1-trimble.pdf ( Beamline, Spring/Summer 1996, Vol. 26, No. 1, pages 40–41.)
After graduation he began a six-year stint at Rhodes University in Grahamstown where he earned a BSc in 1957—Majors: Mathematics, Physics, & Applied math; a Honours degree of Physics in 1958; and a MSc degree of physics, in 1960.
In December 1960 he sailed for Southampton, England on Edinburgh Castle, a ship owned by the Union Castle Line. It was one of the last passenger mail boats to ply the SA-England route, but was sold for scrap in 1967.
On December 10, 2007, his work with respect to COBE, WMAP, and Hydrogen line, was published in The Astrophysical Journal. " High Galactic Latitude Interstellar Neutral Hydrogen Structure and Associated (WMAP) High‐Frequency Continuum Emission"(Abstract) However, Land and Slosar Correlation between galactic HI and the cosmic microwave background (Physical Review D, vol. 76, Issue 8, id. 087301) claimed that the data did not support the correlation claimed by Verschuur. He subsequently published 4 more papers on the subject backing up his claims.
His current research is conducted in partnership with Joan Schmelz, his wife, and elaborates on the exciting discovery they made that the so-called high-velocity clouds are produced by supernova events that occurred relatively close to the Sun, of order hundreds of light years distant, several hundred thousand years ago. They solved the 60 year-old mystery concerning the distance to certain clouds when they found that neutron stars (left over after the explosion) exists in spectroscopic binary systems, the primary example having been discovered by researchers in Belgium led by Ana Escorza who used GAIA data to identify likely neutron star candidates.
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