PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — The California Institute of Technology says physicist Andrew Lange, who conducted award-winning research into the remnants of the Big Bang, is dead at age 53.
Caltech’s president notified colleagues and students in an internal e-mail that Lange apparently took his own life Friday.
Caltech spokesman Jon Weiner (WY’-ner) on Tuesday referred questions about the circumstances to local police.
Lange was co-leader of a project that in 1998 used a telescope, carried over Antarctica by a balloon, to study the so-called cosmic microwave background — a gas of thermal radiation left over from the embryonic universe.