Charles Wolf

This article is about the astronomer and physicist Charles Wolf. For other people, see Charles Wolfe .

Charles Joseph Étienne Wolf (born November 8, 1827 in Vorges , Département Aisne , † July 4, 1918 in Saint-Servan , Département Ille-et-Vilaine ) was a French astronomer and physicist. According to him, and Georges Rayet are Wolf-Rayet star named.

life and work

Wolf came from a farming family in Alsace, his father was also a former officer and mayor of Vorges. Wolf attended the Collège Rollin in Paris and studied from 1848 at the École normal supérieure , graduating in physics in 1851. He was then a grammar school teacher for physics at the lyceum in Nimes and Metz. In 1856 he received his doctorate in physics in Paris with a dissertation on the temperature in capillary tubes and married. He had a daughter with his wife, who died in 1859. In 1858 he became professor of physics at the University of Montpellier and published on spectroscopy.

Wolf was from 1862 assistant at the Paris observatory under its director Urbain Le Verrier , who became aware of him during a solar eclipse expedition (1860). At the observatory he worked with Rayet (who was appointed to the observatory a year later as Wolf), among other things, on star spectroscopy and comets. In 1866 they discovered the Wolf-Rayet stars. He also built a siderostat started by Léon Foucault , had a laboratory with a darkroom and was involved in mapping the sky with an equatorial . When Le Verrier was dismissed as director of the observatory in 1870 because of his authoritarian leadership (previously many employees, including Wolf, resigned in protest against him), Charles Delaunay was appointed as his successor. But Wolf also had problems with him. When Delaunay appointed him director of the observatory in Marseille during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when Wolf was temporarily absent to look after the family estate, Wolf refused to obey. The conflicts with Delaunay then came to a head (he was not given an assistant and his access to the observation instruments was limited). After Delaunay's death, Le Verrier became director of the observatory again in 1872, and the conflicts with him continued for Wolf. Le Verrier complained to the ministry that Wolf was not observing enough (at that time the search for the hypothetical planet Vulcan was within Mercury's orbit, which Le Verrier had predicted due to the inexplicable perihelion of Mercury's orbit), but this explained that the weather was bad. Le Verrier later even accused him of stealing instrument parts. After the death of Le Verrier in 1877, the atmosphere improved under his successors Amédée Mouchez and (from 1892) Félix Tisserand .

After giving lectures at the Sorbonne in support of Le Verrier in the 1870s, he became Chargé de Cours, Professeur adjoint and in 1892 Professor. From then on he devoted himself increasingly to teaching.

He translated and published the General Natural History and Theory of Heaven by Immanuel Kant into French.

Wolf was a member of the Academie des Sciences and in 1898 its president. In 1865 he became an officer of the Legion of Honor and in 1895 a knight. He was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society .

Fonts

• Astronomie et géodésie, cours professé à la Sorbonne, Paris 1891
• Les hypothèses cosmogoniques, Paris: Gauthier-Villars 1886

Web links

• Biography at the Astronomical Society of Lyon by Alain Bremond
• Information on Charles Wolf in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
• Publications by C. Wolf in the Astrophysics Data System
• Obituaries for C. Wolf in the Astrophysics Data System