Gérard-Henri de Vaucouleurs

Gérard-Henri de Vaucouleurs (born April 25, 1918 in Paris , † October 7, 1995 in Austin , Texas ) was a French-American astronomer . He was known as a participant in the dispute over the value of the Hubble constant and as a discoverer of galaxy clusters (from the 1950s).

De Vaucouleurs is his mother's maiden name, which he adopted at a young age.

Life

He was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, graduated from the Sorbonne in 1939. He then worked at the well-established private observatory of Julien Péridier (1882–1967) in Le Houga in south-west France until 1943 , interrupted by military service in the artillery from November 1939 to 1941 In 1943 he resumed his studies at the Sorbonne, where he received his doctorate in 1949 on Rayleigh scattering . He also worked at the Institute for Astrophysics in Paris, where he was considered an expert in stellar photography. In 1949 he went to London, where he hosted a popular science radio program for the BBC and also watched at the University of London Observatory in Mill Hill. In 1951 he went to Australia and did research at the Mount Stromlo observatory there in Canberra (the observations of the southern sky in Australia were the basis of much of his later work). From 1957 he was at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona and from 1958 to 1960 at Harvard University . From 1960 he was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin .

The galaxies were the focus of his research. He is a co-author of the Third Reference Catalog of Bright Galaxies (with his wife Antoinette (1921–1987)). His research on bright, relatively close galaxies led to the discovery of the local supercluster and the Antlia dwarf galaxy . As early as 1948 he published the Vaucouleurs law or de Vaucouleurs profile , which describes the distribution of brightness in elliptical galaxies as a function of the distance from the center. One of the largest Martian craters was named after him in 2000.

In the long-running scientific dispute about the value of the Hubble constant , he advocated a higher value of the constant around 100 km / s per megaparsec (and, associated with this, a younger age of the universe than the values of around 50, then represented by Allan Sandage and Gustav Tammann ). He used many different observational data (brightness, diameter of ring galaxies, the brightest star clusters u. A.) With one of his broadening the risk mentioned (Spreading the risks) method. At first it was highly controversial for its higher values of the Hubble constant.

In addition to his work on galaxies, he also dealt with the planet Mars in his early days. Around 400 research publications, around 100 popular scientific papers and 20 books come from him.

He published a lot with his wife Antoniette Pietra (died 1988), who studied with him and whom he married in 1944. The marriage remained childless. After her death, he remarried an old Parisian friend Elysabeth.

In 1958, his wife Antoniette de Vaucouleurs discovered the great variability of the luminosity of Seyfert galaxies over a period of one month, which she did not publish on the advice of her husband, as he considered the radiation of galaxies to be immutable at the time (De Vaucouleurs later described this as the greatest mistake of his life and he published about it with his wife from 1968).

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986).

Works

Physics of the Planet Mars (1954)
Reference Catalog of Bright Galaxies (1964, 1976, 1991)

Honors

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Margaret Burbridge, Biogr. Memoirs Nat. Acad.

personal data
SURNAME	Vaucouleurs, Gérard-Henri de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French-American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH	April 25, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris
DATE OF DEATH	October 7, 1995
Place of death	Austin

[1] Margaret Burbridge, Biogr. Memoirs Nat. Acad.