|
Gerard Kuiper
Gerard Peter Kuiper ( ; born Gerrit Pieter Kuiper, ; 7 December 1905 – 23 December 1973) was a Dutch-American astronomer, planetary scientist, selenographer, author and professor. The Kuiper belt is named after him. Kuiper is considered by many to be the father of modern planetary science. Early life and education Kuiper, the son of a tailor in the village of Tuitjenhorn in North Holland, had an early interest in astronomy. He had extraordinarily sharp eyesight, allowing him to see with the naked eye Apparent magnitude, magnitude 7.5 stars, about four times fainter than those visible to normal eyes. He studied at Leiden University in 1924, where at the time a very large number of astronomers had congregated. He befriended fellow students Bart Bok and Pieter Oosterhoff, and was taught by Ejnar Hertzsprung, Antonie Pannekoek, Willem de Sitter, Jan Woltjer (astronomer), Jan Woltjer, Jan Oort, and the physicist Paul Ehrenfest. He received his Candidate (degree), c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicolaas Kuiper
Nicolaas Hendrik Kuiper (; 28 June 1920 – 12 December 1994) was a Dutch mathematician, known for Kuiper's test and proving Kuiper's theorem. He also contributed to the Nash embedding theorem. Kuiper studied at University of Leiden in 1937-41, and worked as a secondary school teacher of mathematics in Dordrecht in 1942-47. He completed his Ph.D. in differential geometry from the University of Leiden in 1946 under the supervision of Willem van der Woude. In 1947 he came to the United States at the invitation of Oscar Veblen, where he stayed at the Institute for Advanced Study for one year as Veblen's assistant, and the second year as member of the IAS, meeting Shiing-Shen Chern, and he also went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In February to June 1954, he went for a second time to Ann Arbor where he met Raoul Bott and his student Stephen Smale. In 1950 he was appointed professor of mathematics (and statistics) at the Agricultural University of Wageningen. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ejnar Hertzsprung
Ejnar Hertzsprung (; 8 October 1873 – 21 October 1967) was a Danish chemist and astronomer. He is best remembered for his role in developing the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stars. Career Hertzsprung was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, the son of Severin and Henriette. He studied chemical engineering at Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1898. After spending two years working as a chemist in St. Petersburg, in 1901 he studied photochemistry at Leipzig University for a year. His father was an amateur astronomer, which led to Ejnar's interest in the subject. He began making astronomical observations in Frederiksberg in 1902, and within a few years had noticed that stars with similar spectral type could have widely different absolute magnitudes. In 1909, he took a position at the Göttingen Observatory under director Karl Schwarzschild. In 1911 Hertzsprung developed the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, independently developed in 1913 by Henry Norris Russell. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yerkes Observatory
Yerkes Observatory ( ) is an astronomical observatory located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, United States. The observatory was operated by the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from its founding in 1897 until 2018. Ownership was transferred to the non-profit Yerkes Future Foundation (YFF) in May 2020, which began millions of dollars of restoration and renovation of the historic building and grounds. Yerkes re-opened for public tours and programming in May 2022. The observatory, often called "the birthplace of modern astrophysics", was founded in 1892 by astronomer George Ellery Hale and financed by businessman Charles T. Yerkes. It represented a shift in the thinking about observatories, from their being mere housing for telescopes and observers, to the early-20th-century concept of observation equipment integrated with laboratory space for physics and chemistry analysis. The observatory's main dome houses a 40-in aperture (102 cm) doublet len ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bosscha Observatory
Bosscha Observatory is the oldest modern observatory in Indonesia, and one of the oldest in Asia. The observatory is located in Lembang, West Bandung Regency, West Java, approximately north of Bandung. It is situated on a hilly six hectares of land and is above mean sea level plateau. The IAU observatory code for Bosscha is 299. History During the first meeting of the ''Nederlandsch-Indische Sterrekundige Vereeniging'' (Dutch-Indies Astronomical Society) in the 1920s, it was agreed that an observatory was needed to study astronomy in the Dutch East Indies. Of all locations in the Indonesia archipelago, a tea plantation in Malabar, a few kilometers north of Bandung in West Java was selected. It is on the hilly north side of the city with a non-obstructed view of the sky and with close access to the city that was planned to become the new capital of the Dutch colony, replacing Batavia (present-day Jakarta). The observatory is named after the tea plantation owner Karel Albert Rud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Java
Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, projected to rise to 158 million at mid 2025, Java is the world's List of islands by population, most populous island, home to approximately 55.7% of the Demographics of Indonesia, Indonesian population (only approximately 44.3% of Indonesian population live outside Java). Indonesia's capital city, Jakarta, is on Java's northwestern coast. Many of the best known events in Indonesian history took place on Java. It was the centre of powerful Hindu-Buddhist empires, the Islamic sultanates, and the core of the colonial Dutch East Indies. Java was also the center of the History of Indonesia, Indonesian struggle for independence during the 1930s and 1940s. Java dominates Indonesia politically, economically and culturally. Four of Indonesia's eig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harvard College Observatory
The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, and was founded in 1839. With the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, it forms part of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. HCO houses the Harvard Plate Stacks, a collection of approximately 600,000 astronomical plates taken between the mid-1880s and 1989 (with a gap from 1953–1968). This 100-year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe. The Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard project scanned and 429,274 direct image plates, leaving nearly 200,000 spectra and other photographic plates yet to be digitized. In 2024, a new database, StarGlass, was created to combine the scientific data from the plates with the Plate Stack's archival holdings. History In 1839, the Ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lick Observatory
The Lick Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the University of California. It is on the summit of Mount Hamilton (California), Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California, United States. The observatory is managed by the University of California Observatories, with headquarters on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, where its scientific staff moved in the mid-1960s. It is named after James Lick. The first new moon of Jupiter to be identified since the time of Galileo, Amalthea (moon), Amalthea, the planet's fifth moon, was discovered at this observatory in 1892. Early history Lick Observatory is the world's first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory. The observatory, in a Classical Revival architecture, Classical Revival style structure, was constructed between 1876 and 1887, from a bequest from James Lick of $700,000, . Lick, originally a carpenter and piano maker, had arrived from Peru in San Franc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Grant Aitken
Robert Grant Aitken (December 31, 1864 – October 29, 1951) was an American astronomer. Early life and education Robert Grant Aitken was born in Jackson, California, to Scottish immigrant Robert Aitken and Wilhelmina Depinau. Aitken attended Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated with an undergraduate degree in 1887. Career From 1887–1891, he worked as a mathematics instructor at Livermore, California, then received his M.A. from Williams College in 1892. He became a professor of mathematics at the College of the Pacific, another liberal arts school. He was offered an assistant astronomer position at Lick Observatory in California in 1895. He began a systematically study of double stars, measuring their positions and calculating their orbits around one another. From 1899, in collaboration with W. J. Hussey, he methodically created a very large catalog of such stars. This ongoing work was published in Lick Observatory bulletins. In 1905, Hussey left and Ai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary Star
A binary star or binary star system is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved as separate stars using a telescope, in which case they are called ''visual binaries''. Many visual binaries have long orbital periods of several centuries or millennia and therefore have orbits which are uncertain or poorly known. They may also be detected by indirect techniques, such as spectroscopy (''spectroscopic binaries'') or astrometry (''astrometric binaries''). If a binary star happens to orbit in a plane along our line of sight, its components will eclipse and transit each other; these pairs are called ''eclipsing binaries'', or, together with other binaries that change brightness as they orbit, ''photometric binaries''. If components in binary star systems are close enough, they can gravitationally distort each other's outer stellar atmospheres. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Candidate (degree)
Candidate ( or ) is the name of various academic degrees, which are today mainly awarded in Scandinavia. The degree title was phased out in much of Europe through the 1999 Bologna Process, which has re-formatted academic degrees in Europe. The degrees are now, or were once, awarded in the Nordic countries, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In Scandinavia and the Nordic countries, a candidate degree is a higher professional-level degree which corresponds to 5–7 years of studies. In the Soviet states, a candidate degree was a research degree roughly equivalent to a Doctor of Philosophy degree. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it was an undergraduate first-cycle degree roughly comparable with the bachelor's degree. Etymology and origins The term is derived from the Latin ''candida'', meaning white. In Ancient Rome, men running for political office would typically wear togas chalked and bleached to be bright white at speeches, debates, conventions, and other public f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Ehrenfest
Paul Ehrenfest (; 18 January 1880 – 25 September 1933) was an Austrian Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist who made major contributions to statistical mechanics and its relation to quantum physics, quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem. He befriended Albert Einstein on a visit to Prague in 1912 and became a professor in Leiden, where he frequently hosted Einstein. Suffering from depression, in 1933 Ehrenfest killed his disabled son, Wassik, and then himself. Biography Paul Ehrenfest was born on 18 January 1880 in Vienna to Ashkenazi Jews, Jewish parents, who were originally from Loštice in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). His parents, Sigmund Ehrenfest and Johanna Jellinek, managed a grocery store. Although the family was not overly religious, Paul studied Hebrew language, Hebrew and Jewish history. Later, he always emphasized his Jewish ancestry. Ehrenfest excelled in grade school but did not do well at the Akad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jan Oort
Jan Hendrik Oort ( or ; 28 April 1900 – 5 November 1992) was a Dutch astronomer who made significant contributions to the understanding of the Milky Way and who was a pioneer in the field of radio astronomy. ''The New York Times'' called him "one of the century's foremost explorers of the universe"; the European Space Agency website describes him as "one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century" and states that he "revolutionised astronomy through his ground-breaking discoveries." In 1955, Oort's name appeared in ''Life'' magazine's list of the 100 most famous living people. He has been described as "putting the Netherlands in the forefront of postwar astronomy". Oort determined that the Milky Way rotates and overturned the idea that the Sun was at its center. He also analyzed the vertical motions of stars near the Sun, using this data to estimate the local gravitational field. He calculated how much mass must be present to account for the stellar motions perpendicular ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
