Edwin Brant Frost

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Edwin Brant Frost (born July 14, 1866 in Brattleboro , Vermont , † May 14, 1935 in Chicago ) was an American astronomer .

Life

Frost graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover , New Hampshire . He was interested in astronomy at an early age, graduated in 1886 and then briefly worked at the Department of Chemistry. In 1887 he accepted an invitation from Charles Augustus Young to Princeton to continue his education there in the field of astronomy. From the end of 1887 he taught at Dartmouth College until 1898, only interrupted by a long study trip to Europe. It took him to London in 1890 to William Huggins and then to Strasbourg and Potsdam, where he worked in 1891 at the Astrophysical Observatory with Hermann Carl Vogel and Julius Scheiner for the spectral analysis of celestial bodies. This work inspired him to translate Scheiner and Vogel's book Die Spectralanalyse der Gestirne (1890) into English. It first appeared in 1894 under the title Astronomical Spectroscopy . In the fall of 1892 he returned to the United States and became an assistant professor of astronomy at Dartmouth College. In 1898 he went to the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago in Williams Bay at the invitation of George Ellery Hale and became a professor. In 1905 he became director of the observatory, a position he held until his retirement in 1932. After he was blind in one eye in 1915, he lost sight in the other eye in 1921 as well. Despite his blindness, he directed the Yerkes Observatory for an additional eleven years and edited the Astrophysical Journal .

Frost's main area of ​​work was stellar spectroscopy - the study of star spectra , including that of the sun. He was particularly interested in the spectroscopic determination of the radial velocity of stars and the spectroscopic binary stars . Some of his work was done in collaboration with Otto von Struve , whose employment at the Yerkes Observatory Frost had supported and who succeeded him as director in 1932.

Frost received numerous awards and honors. In 1890 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1908 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1913 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1909 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1908 he was admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society as a foreign member , an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College in 1911 and from the University of Cambridge in 1912 . The asteroid (854) Frostia was named after him, as was a moon crater.

He published an autobiography in 1933 under the title An Astronomer's Life .

literature

  • Philip Fox: Edwin Brant Frost, 1866-1935 . In: Astrophysical Journal . tape 83 , no. 1 , 1936, pp. 1-9 .
  • Otto Struve: Edwin Brant Frost, 1866-1935 . In: Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences . tape 19 . Washington, DC 1937, p. 25-51 .
  • William Sheehan: Frost, Edwin Brant . In: Thomas Hockey, Virgina Trimble et al. (Ed.): Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers . 1, A-L. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 978-0-387-31022-0 , pp. 395-396 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Historic Fellows: Edwin Frost. (No longer available online.) American Association for the Advancement of Science, archived from the original on August 15, 2018 ; accessed on August 14, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.aaas.org
  2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter F. (PDF; 815 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved August 15, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Member History: Edwin Brant Frost. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 14, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Frost, Edwin Brant
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH July 14, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Brattleboro , Vermont
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 1935
Place of death Chicago