Manali Kallat Vainu Bappu (10 August 1927 – 19 August 1982) was an Indian astronomer and president of the
International Astronomical Union
The International Astronomical Union (IAU; , UAI) is an international non-governmental organization (INGO) with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach, education, and developmen ...
. Bappu helped to establish several astronomical institutions in India, including the
Vainu Bappu Observatory which is named after him, and he also contributed to the establishment of the modern
Indian Institute of Astrophysics. In 1957, he discovered the
Wilson–Bappu effect jointly with American astronomer
Olin Chaddock Wilson.
On 2 July 1949, when Bappu was taking pictures of the night sky, he spotted a bright moving object which he had rightfully understood to be a
comet
A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing. This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or Coma (cometary), coma surrounding ...
. When he turned to his professor,
Bart Bok
Bartholomeus Jan "Bart" Bok (April 28, 1906 – August 5, 1983) was a Dutch-American astronomer, teacher, and lecturer. He is best known for his work on the structure and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, and for the discovery of Bok globules, w ...
, and colleague Gordon Newkirk, they confirmed the discovery. They calculated the orbit of the comet which revealed that the comet would reappear only after 60,000 years.
The International Astronomical Union officially named the comet as the Bappu-Bok-Newkirk comet (C/1949N1). Bappu also received the Donohoe Comet Medal of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
This is the only comet with an Indian name.
Early life
Vainu Bappu was born on 10 August 1927, in
Chennai
Chennai, also known as Madras (List of renamed places in India#Tamil Nadu, its official name until 1996), is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Tamil Nadu by population, largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost states and ...
, as the only child of Manali Kukuzhi Bappu and Kallat Sunanna bappu.
[ His family originally hails from Thalassery in ]Kerala
Kerala ( , ) is a States and union territories of India, state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile ...
. His grandfather kakkuzhi kunji bappu gurukkal whose family was an aristrocatic thiyya tharavad in tellichery was a sanskrit poet and scholar and father was an astronomer at the Nizamiah Observatory in Telangana
Telangana is a States and union territories of India, state in India situated in the Southern India, south-central part of the Indian subcontinent on the high Deccan Plateau. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, ele ...
.[ He attended the Harvard Graduate School of Astronomy for his PhD after obtaining postgraduate degree from the Madras University.][
]
Discoveries
Bappu, along with two of his colleagues, discovered the 'Bappu-Bok-Newkirk' comet.[''Indian Astronomy : From Jantar-Mantar to Kavalur'']
Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. He was awarded the Donhoe Comet-Medal by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1949.[Bhattacharyya, J. C. (2002), "M K Vainu Bappu", ''Resonance'', 7 (8), Springer India.]
In a paper published in 1957, American astronomer Olin Chaddock Wilson and Bappu had described what would later be known as the Wilson–Bappu effect.[ The effect as described by L.V. Kuhi is: 'The width of the Ca II emission in normal, nonvariable, G, K, and M stars is correlated with the visual absolute magnitude in the sense that the brighter the star the wider the emission.'][Kuhi, L. V., "The Wilson-Bappu Effect in T Tauri Stars", ''Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific'', 77 (457): 253.] The paper opened up the field of stellar chromospheres for research.[
]
Vainu Bappu Observatory
On his return to India, Bappu was appointed to head a team of astronomers to build an observatory at Nainital.[ His efforts of building an indigenous large ]optical telescope
An optical telescope gathers and focus (optics), focuses light mainly from the visible spectrum, visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, to create a magnification, magnified image for direct visual inspection, to make a photograph, or to co ...
and a research observatory led to the founding of the optical observatory of Kavalur and its large telescope.[ The Vainu Bappu Observatory is one of the main observatories of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, also initiated in its modern avatar by Bappu in 1971.][ Later, a number of discoveries were made from the Vainu Bappu Observatory.][At Kavalur the first observations with an indigenously built 38 cm telescope were made in late 1967. In Kavalur, the one-metre Zeiss telescope was installed in 1972, and the very next month, during an occultation event, scientists discovered a trace of atmosphere on Ganymede, the largest satellite of ]Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...
. Five years later the same telescope discovered the rings of Uranus
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It is a gaseous cyan-coloured ice giant. Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a Supercritical fluid, supercritical phase of matter, which astronomy calls "ice" or Volatile ( ...
. -
''Indian Astronomy : From Jantar-Mantar to Kavalur''
Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.
Career overview
See also
* Cosmic distance ladder
The cosmic distance ladder (also known as the extragalactic distance scale) is the succession of methods by which astronomers determine the distances to celestial objects. A ''direct'' distance measurement of an astronomical object is possible ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bappu, Vainu
1927 births
Harvard University alumni
Indian astrophysicists
1982 deaths
Recipients of the Padma Bhushan in science & engineering
People from Thalassery
Scientists from Kerala
20th-century Indian astronomers
Presidents of the International Astronomical Union