On 16 September 2022, Tom Marsh – the founding professor of astrophysics at the University of Warwick – was reported missing on La Silla. On 10 November 2022, the Chilean authorities announced that they had found Tom’s body approximately 2.5 km from the summit. Tom’s family, friends and colleagues, with the considerable help of ESO staff, have recently installed a memorial for him on La Silla.
A Memorial for Tom Marsh on La Silla
Published: 23 Aug 2024
The memorial is located on the right-hand side of the road from the NTT to SEST, with a beautiful backdrop of the slopes down from Cerro La Silla towards the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Ocean. The memorial consists of a steel post at the top of which is mounted a scale model of ULTRACAM, the high-speed, triple-beam optical imager that Tom co-developed1. ULTRACAM was the first visitor instrument to use the Visitor Focus of the VLT, and is now permanently mounted on the NTT, making Tom a frequent visitor to Paranal and La Silla. Tom and his colleagues used ULTRACAM to discover, amongst other things, the first white dwarf pulsar2.
A plaque is mounted on the front of the steel post with some words of remembrance and a diagram of the lines of constant radial velocity in a Keplerian accretion disc around the primary star in a binary system. This classic diagram is well known to the hundreds of astronomers around the world who have used the Doppler Tomography technique that Tom co-developed3, for which he was awarded the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2018.
We hope visitors to the site who knew Tom may take some comfort on their next visit to La Silla by walking up to the memorial to remember him.
Vik Dhillon
Felicity Marsh
Danny Steeghs
1 Dhillon, V. et al. 2007, MNRAS, 378, 825
2 Marsh, T. et al. 2016, Nature, 537, 374
3 Marsh, T. & Horne, K. 1988, MNRAS, 235, 269