Born Jaan Eisenschmidt in Tartu, the name "Einasto" is an anagram of "Estonia" (it was chosen by his patriotic father in the 1930s to replace the family's German name).[4]
Einasto married and had 3 children, 2 daughters and the youngest, a son. His daughter, Maret, is also an astrophysicist, who collaborates with her father.[5]
Since 1991 he is member of Academia Europaea. Since 1994 he is member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1974, in a seminal work with Kaasik and Saar at the Tartu Observatory, Einasto argued that "it is necessary to adopt an alternative hypothesis: that the clusters of galaxies are stabilised by hidden matter."[6] This was a key paper in recognizing that a hidden matter, i.e., dark matter, could explain observational anomalies in astronomy.[7][8]
Einasto showed in 1977 at a Symposium in Tallinn (Estonia) that the universe has a cell structure, in which the observed matter surrounds huge empty voids.[9]
^Einasto, Jaan (2013). Dark Matter and Cosmic Web Story. World Scientific Publishing. ISBN978-981-4551-05-2. In the 1930s [the] Estonian government started a campaign to change German names to Estonian ones. So our family name was also changed. My father was a real patriot of Estonia, so he invented the name "Einasto", which is a permutation of "Estonia". The name was patented, so nobody else can have this name. In this respect our family name is unique.
^Joever, Mihkel; Einasto, Jaan (1978). "Has the universe the cell structure?". The Large Scale Structure of the Universe; Proceedings of the Symposium, Tallin, Estonian SSR. International Astronomical Union: Symposium no. 79, Reidel: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1978IAUS...79..241J.
