BOSTON (AP) – Jules Aarons, an internationally known Boston University physicist and acclaimed photographer whose work is in the permanent collection in the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has died after battling congestive heart failure. He was 87.

He died Friday at his home in Newton, according to Brezniak-Rodman Funeral Directors Inc.

In 1981, Aarons joined the faculty at Boston University and helped establish the university’s Center for Space Physics in 1987. From 1980 to 1983, he was chairman of the International Radio Science Union’s Commission on Ionospheric Radio Wave Propagation.

But in addition to his work in physics, the Bronx, N.Y.-born scientist was also a well-known photographer, something he began while an undergraduate at the City College of New York. His photography includes images taken in Western Europe, India, Japan, South America, Israel, and Puerto Rico.

His work is also in the permanent collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale.

Aarons was predeceased by his wife, Jeanette, whom he married in 1944.

Aarons has two sons, Philip of New York, and Herbert Gene of Salinas, Calif., and three grandchildren.