Amahl Shakhashiri is the wife of astronomer and astrophysicist, Frank Drake. Drake and Amahl met at Cornell.
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The couple were married from 1978 until Drake’s death. They have two daughters: Nadia, who became a science journalist; and Leila, who became a ballet dancer.
Drake played an important role in the composition of messages sent from Earth in the hope that an alien civilization will discover and read them one day.
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Drake was the first person to map the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, and he coined the term “pulsar” to describe rapidly rotating neutron stars.
He observed Jupiter’s radiation belts for the first time, and he was one of the first astronomers to measure Venus’s searing surface temperature and the greenhouse effect of its thick atmosphere.
Frank Drake passed away on September 2, 2022, at his home in Aptos, California, from natural causes at the age of 92.
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