Annie Jump Cannon

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Annie Jump Cannon at work at Harvard Observatory

Annie Jump Cannon (born December 11, 1863 in Dover , Delaware , USA ; † April 13, 1941 in Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA) was an American astronomer . She became known through the motto Oh, Be A Fine Girl - Kiss Me! , which generations of astronomers taught the order of the spectral classes .

Life

Cannon was the eldest of three daughters of Wilson Cannon, a shipbuilder and senator from Delaware, and his wife Mary Jump.

Annie studied physics and astronomy at Wellesley College and began making spectroscopic observations of stars .

After graduation, she returned to Delaware for a decade. After her mother's death in 1894, she began working as a teacher in Wellesley and studied astronomy in Radcliffe . In 1896 she began with Edward Charles Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory with astronomical data reduction.

Harvard Classification of Spectral Lines according to Annie Jump Cannon. The numerical subgroups are missing.

Thanks to the preparatory work of Nettie Farrar, Williamina Fleming , Antonia Maury and their patience, she came to classify the spectral lines of the stars in the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K and M. With this, she revised the previous system of the spectral sequence of Stars by removing some of the original classes from the sequence through new knowledge. Cannon also introduced numbers to further subdivide the spectral type of a star. To do this, she used numbers from 0 to 9, with a higher number corresponding to a lower temperature of the star. The sun is, for example, a star of the spectral type G2 and therefore cooler than a star with the classification G1, but warmer than a star with the spectral type G3.

Cannon classified more than 400,000 stars. She also published a catalog of variable stars . One of her collaborators was the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin .

Her career coincided with a period of increasing recognition for women's achievement in science . She was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford and was accepted into the American Astronomical Society (AAS). In 1929, the League of Women Voters named her one of the twelve most important American women alive. The AAS Annie Jump Cannon Prize for Astronomy , the asteroid (1120) Cannonia and the lunar crater Cannon are named in her honor. In 1925 she was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society . On December 11, 2014, on the 151st birthday, Google honored Annie Jump Cannon with its own Google Doodle .

Web links

Commons : Annie Jump Cannon  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, Volume 1 in the Google Book Search
  2. ^ Member History: Annie Jump Cannon. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 29, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Annie Jump Cannon's 151st Birthday , accessed June 26, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Cannon, Annie Jump
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Dover , Delaware , USA
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1941
Place of death Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA