John Huchra | Astronomer, 61

John Huchra, 61, an astronomer whose pioneering maps of a bubbly universe challenged notions of how the galaxies were born, died last Friday at his home in Lexington, Mass., of a heart attack, his wife, Rebecca M. Henderson, said.

Dr. Huchra will be remembered as well for what looks like a child's stick-figure drawing of a man but in fact is a map showing how the galaxies are distributed through about 600 million light-years of space.

Astronomers had long presumed that if they looked out far enough beyond the Local Group of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs, galaxies would be spread more or less evenly. Dr. Huchra's map, produced in 1986 with Margaret J. Geller and Valerie de Lapparent, showed instead that the galaxies seemed to be confined to great sheets arcing around enormous dark and presumably empty voids millions of light-years across, clustering in dense knots where the sheets intersected.

"Margaret coined the analogy of the soap bubble universe, and it stuck," Dr. Huchra wrote on a website for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he spent his career.

Dr. Huchra received a degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.

He arrived in Cambridge in 1976 as a postdoctoral fellow at the newly created Harvard-Smithsonian center.

He made his first splash in 1978, when he, Marc Aaronson of the University of Arizona, and Jeremy Mould, now at the University of Melbourne in Australia, announced that the universe was expanding twice as fast and was therefore only half as old - about nine billion years - as most astronomers had thought.

The work, using the brightness and rotation speeds of spiral galaxies as a cosmic distance marker, propelled the young astronomers into the middle of a bitter, long-standing debate among older astronomers who could not agree within a factor of 2 about the size and age of the universe. - N.Y. Times News Service