Edouard Albert Roche

Edouard Roche

Édouard Albert Roche [ eˈdwaːʀ alˈbɛːʀ ʀɔʃ ] (born October 17, 1820 in Montpellier ; † April 18, 1883 ibid) was a French astronomer and mathematician and is best known for his work in the field of celestial mechanics. The Roche limit , the Roche sphere , the Roche volume and the Roche potential go back to his name.

Life

He studied at the University of Montpellier , where he obtained his doctorate in 1844 . After studying for a few years in Paris, he returned to Montpellier in 1849, where he was professor of mathematics from 1852 to 1881 . In 1873 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences .

Roche became famous through the accepted today theory that the rings of Saturn by breaking one of the moons of Saturn have emerged whose distance has come to the planet below a certain critical level, and provided a formula for this named after him Roche limit on . The cause of the break is tidal forces .

The Roche limit also applies to stars, but is then called Roche Volume . This indicates how large the volume of a star in a binary star system has to be before matter overflows from one star to the other.

He also refuted the nebular hypothesis of Pierre-Simon Laplace . Laplace was of the opinion that the planets were formed from the lenticular atmosphere of the sun, which in the end became ever denser and faster. However, in a mathematical analysis Roche came to the conclusion that a rapidly rotating lens-shaped body is actually not stable. A moon crater , a Phobos crater and the asteroid (38237) Roche are named after Édouard Albert Roche .

Web links

• SAO / NASA ADS Abstract Service. In: harvard.edu. adsabs.harvard.edu, accessed February 10, 2017 . 

Individual evidence

1. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter R. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 21, 2020 (French). 
2. ↑ Édouard Albert Roche in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature of the IAU (WGPSN) / USGS