Franco Pacini

Franco Pacini, Italian astrophysicist who first gave an explanation of pulsars as rotating neutron stars with a magnetic field not aligned with the rotation axis, died in his native Florence at the age of 72. Besides being the past director of the Arcetri Observatory, on the hill above Florence where Galileo once lived, he was very active in the creation of the Large Binocular Telescope on Graham Mountain in Arizona, with its 2 mirrors spanning 8.4 meters. In a video Interview which I saw on YouTube he spoke also of the VIRGO interferometer in Cascina. Addio Franco. RIP.