Dorothea Klumpke

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dorothea Klumpke, around 1886

Dorothea Klumpke , married Roberts (*, 9. August 1861 in San Francisco , California ; † 5. October 1942 , ibid) was an American , mainly in Paris living astronomer .

Life

Dorothea Klumpke was the daughter of the German immigrant John Gerard Klumpke (1825–1917), who originally came to California in the gold rush and made a fortune there with real estate, and of Dorothea Mathilda Tolle (married in 1855). Like her five sisters and two brothers, Klumpke was sent to schools in Europe. Anna Elizabeth became a well-known painter of her sisters , Julia became a violinist and composer (pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe ), Mathilda became a pianist (pupil of Antoine François Marmontel ) and Augusta became a neurologist , who founded a clinic with her husband Joseph Jules Dejerine .

From 1877 Dorothea Klumpke was in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne , where she graduated in mathematics (or astronomy) in 1886, after having started training as a musician like two of her sisters. She then took a position at the Paris Observatory , where she worked with Guillaume Bigourdan and Lipót Schulhof and the pioneers of astrophotography Paul and Prosper Henry , who photographed asteroids with the new 34 cm refractor . When the Paris observatory was looking for a leader for the major international sky map project ( Carte du Ciel ), for which stars up to 11th magnitude were to be mapped, she prevailed against the competition of 50 men.

In 1893 she was the first woman in France to receive a doctorate in mathematics with a dissertation on the rings of Saturn . The examiners included Gaston Darboux , Marie Henri Andoyer and Félix Tisserand .

In 1899 she was selected by the director of the observatory in Meudon Jules Janssen to carry out balloon studies for the Leonids meteor shower (which, according to observations in 1799, 1833 and 1866, had been predicted as the last great astronomical event of the late 19th century) by the French , which however, it brought disappointing results for the high expectations of the time. On November 16, 1899, she ascended early in the morning in the Le Centaur balloon with two companions over Paris at an altitude of 1,600 feet and flew with it towards the English Channel. In five hours they only saw 30 meteors, half of which belonged to the Leonids. At the same time, such balloon examinations were carried out in Germany and Russia. As a leading female aeronaut and the first woman to make astronomical observations from a balloon, she received a lot of attention at the time.

On an expedition with the ship Norse King to Norway to observe the total solar eclipse of August 9, 1896 (which, however, was covered by clouds), she met the wealthy Welsh entrepreneur and pioneer of astrophotography Isaac Roberts (1829-1904), who had his own owned a private observatory. They married in 1901 (despite an age difference of 31 years). She left the Paris Observatory and helped her husband photograph astronomical nebulae (the 52 Fields of Nebulosity by William Herschel ). After the death of her husband in 1904, she continued his work, first in their joint residence in Sussex and then in Paris, where they again worked at the observatory and lived with her sister Anna and her mother in the chateau of Rosa Bonheur . For 25 years she measured the photographic plates of the nebulae and published them in 1929 (for the 100th birthday of her husband) as The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel's Fields of Nebulosity . For this she received the Hèléne and Paul Helbronner Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1932.

In 1934 she moved back to California with her sister Anna, where she stayed afterwards. She had never given up her US citizenship. Her home in San Francisco was the center of a circle of scientists and artists.

In 1893 she became an academic officer of the French Academy of Sciences, whose first Prix ​​des Dames she received in 1889. In 1934 she was personally awarded a Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French President.

The “Klumpke-Roberts-Award” of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is named after her, originally donated by her as a lecture series and given as an annual prize since 1974 to people or groups who have made a contribution to the popularization of astronomy. Klumpke bequeathed foundations to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific as well as the University of California and the Paris Observatory and campaigned for the advancement of women in astronomy. The minor planets 339 Dorothea and 1040 Klumpkea are named after her.

She was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society , a member of the British Astronomical Association , the Sociétié Astronomique de France, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

After Dorothea Klumpke's death in 1942, her urn was buried in the San Francisco Columbarium .

literature

  • John David North : Cosmos , University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 520f
  • Robert G. Aitken: Dorothea Klumpke Roberts - an appreciation , Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 54, December 1942, p. 217.
  • John H. Reynolds: Dorothea Klumpke Roberts , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 104, 1944, p. 92
  • Katherine Bracher: Dorothea Klumpke Roberts: A forgotten astronomer , Mercury, Volume 10, September / October 1981, p. 139
  • Kenneth Weitzenhoffer: The Triumph of Dorothea Klumpke , Sky and Telescope, Volume 72, August 1986, p. 109
  • Maria Chiara: Dorothea Klumpke Roberts (1861–1942) - astronomer , in Benjamin and Barbara Shearer Notable women in the physical sciences , Greenwood Press 1997, pp. 336–342
  • Bessie van Vorst: The Klumpke Sisters , Critic, Volume 37, 1900

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dorothea Klumpke: A night in a Balloon , Century Magazine, Volume 60, 1900, p. 276, the same (as Dorothy K. Roberts) Observed the Leonids from a Balloon , Popular Astronomy, Volume 11, 1903, pp. 220-222
personal data
SURNAME Klumpke, Dorothea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH August 9, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco , California , United States
DATE OF DEATH October 5, 1942
Place of death San Francisco , California , United States