Boris Petrovich Gerasimowitsch

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Boris Petrovich Gerassimowitsch ( Russian Борис Петрович Герасимович ; born March 19 . Jul / 31 March  1889 . Greg in Kremenchuk , † the 30th November 1937 in Leningrad ) was a Ukrainian - Russian astronomer , astrophysicist and university teachers .

Life

Gerasimowitsch attended high school in Poltava from 1899 . In 1906, during his final year at school before graduating, he was expelled for involvement in revolutionary unrest and lost the right to attend other schools. During this time he was a member of a social revolutionary fighting organization . He was arrested four times and has been detained for a total of two years.

In 1909 Gerasimowitsch passed the external school leaving examination, so that in 1910 he began studying at the physics and mathematics faculty of the University of Kharkov . In his sophomore year he received the A. F. Pavlovsky Prize for his work on aberration of light and the theory of relativity , published in the News of the Russian Astronomical Society in 1912 and in the Bulletin Astronomique in 1914 . After graduating in 1914, he stayed at the university on the recommendation of his teacher Ludwig von Struve to prepare for a professorship. In 1916 he did an internship at the Pulkovo Observatory with Aristarch Belopolski and Sergei Kostinski .

1917 Gerasimowitsch became a private lecturer at the University of Kharkov. In 1922 he was appointed professor. In addition, he was a professor at the Kharkov Technology Institute (until 1925) and held a chair at the Kharkov Geodesy Institute. Between 1924 and 1935 he was sent to Denmark , France and the Harvard College Observatory to study. From 1929 he headed the chair for theoretical mechanics at the Kharkov Institute for Popular Education (ChINO).

The focus of his scientific work was problems of variable stars , their structure and evolution, star statistics, the physics of interstellar matter and planetary nebulae , the structure of the stellar atmosphere , theoretical astronomy and solar physics . In 1927, together with Willem Jacob Luyten, he determined the distance between the sun and the plane of the Milky Way . In 1928, in a pioneering work with Donald Menzel , he investigated the release of energy by stars using statistical mechanics . He was the first among astronomers to study the astronomical aspects of cosmic rays . He studied the Be stars in detail . He took part in several expeditions to observe total solar eclipses .

In 1931 Gerasimowitsch became head of the astrophysics department of the Pulkovo Observatory and in 1933 director of the observatory. After the academic degrees that had been abolished after the October Revolution had been reintroduced in January 1934 , Gerasimowitsch was awarded a doctorate in physical-mathematical sciences in December 1934 without defending a dissertation .

Gerasimowitsch was arrested on June 28, 1937 (like Dmitri Jeropkin before him ). For involvement in the fascist terrorist Trotsky Zinoviev organization, the military college of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death by shooting, which happened on November 30, 1937. Rehabilitation took place in 1957.

Much the same happened to many scientists at the Pulkovo Observatory, later known as the Pulkovo Affair . The scientists were accused by the NKVD of participating in the terrorist fascist Trotsky Zinoviev organization, which was founded by the German secret service to overthrow the government of the Soviet Union and establish a fascist dictatorship on Soviet soil in 1932. The number of victims of this Pulkovo affair, which marked the beginning of the Great Terror , could not be precisely determined. The victims included not only scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory, but also astronomers, geologists , geophysicists , geodesists and mathematicians in various scientific institutes in Leningrad, Moscow and other cities.

Gerasimowitsch's name is borne by the crater Gerasimovich on the moon and the minor planet (2126) Gerasimovich , which was discovered in 1970 by Tamara Mikhailovna Smirnova at the Crimean Observatory .

Web links

Commons : Boris Petrovich Gerassimowitsch  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e ГЕРАСИМОВИЧ - родственники (accessed September 28, 2017).
  2. ^ A b Hockey, Thomas: The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers . Springer Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-387-31022-0 .
  3. ^ Letter of Procurator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to Tatiana Borisovna Gerasimovicha (accessed September 28, 2017).
  4. ↑ P. James E. Peebles , R. Bruce Partridge, Lyman A. Page Jr .: Finding the Big Bang . Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-51982-3 , pp. 134 .
  5. ^ Loren R. Graham: Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History . Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-521-28789-8 , pp. 197 .
  6. ^ Schmadel, Lutz D .: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . 5th edition. Springer Verlag, New York 2003, ISBN 3-540-00238-3 , pp. 172 .
personal data
SURNAME Gerasimowitsch, Boris Petrovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Герасимович, Борис Петрович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian-Russian astronomer, astrophysicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Kremenchuk
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 1937
Place of death Leningrad