Noah Brosch

Brosch retired from his academic position in May 2017 (age limit for Tel Aviv University academics) but remains an active researcher retaining his office, observing time allocation, etc.

Brosch and Adi Zitrin, his MSc student, identified a possible dark matter filament relatively close to the Milky Way and the Local Group in the form of a chain of galaxies in the local void . The reality of this galaxy filament, and the identification of another, shorter filament in the same neighborhood, was confirmed by McQuinn et al. (2014). Together with another student, he showed that many near-Earth asteroids are probably only "rubble piles" so that attempts to mitigate possible future impacts by such asteroids using exploding nuclear devices might not be successful.

Noah Brosch organized a campaign to observe the Leonid meteor shower in 1999 that included ground teams in Israel equipped with intensified video cameras and airborne observations from two NASA aircraft that deployed to Ben Gurion airport in Israel in order to observe meteors from a high altitude together with the ground teams and with a powerful phased-array radar in Israel. A description of the campaign and some of the results were published in the book "Leonid Storm Research" .

Brosch was the Principal Investigator of the TAUVEX space telescope array from 1989 to 2011. TAUVEX was intended to study the ultraviolet sky in spectral bands not observable from the ground by using three co-aligned telescopes, each imaging the same one-degree wide sky region. Because of these innovative aspects, TAUVEX was selected in 1988 by the Israel Space Agency (ISA) as its first priority experiment to be launched in space, but its promised satellite and launcher never materialized. The TAUVEX project was cancelled by ISA after attempts to launch it as an associated payload on the Spektr-RG platform (led by the Soviet Union) between 1991 and 2000, then later from 2000 to 2010 on the Indian GSAT-4 spacecraft, failed for various reasons. ISA also refused to let the fight model of TAUVEX be used for balloon flights that could have yielded valuable information in a spectral band around 200 nm.

Brosch discovered the atmosphere of Pluto in 1985 by observing the occultation of a star by the then-considered outermost planet in the Solar System. This observation was analyzed in a paper published much later.

Brosch studied at Tel Aviv University (BSc 1975 and MSc 1977) and at the Leiden University (PhD 1983). He is a tenured Principal Research Associate (degree equivalent to Research Associate Professor) at Tel Aviv University and served as Director of the Wise Observatory from 2000 to 2006 and again from 2007 to 2010. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and from 2009 to 2012 served as the Vice-President of its Division XI (Space and High-Energies Astrophysics) of the IAU.

Noah Brosch (born 1948) is an Israeli astronomer, astrophysicist and space researcher.

Noah Brosch was born in Bucharest (Romania) in 1948 and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1963.