Hermann Brück

Hermann Alexander Brück (born August 15, 1905 in Berlin , † March 4, 2000 in Edinburgh ) was a German astronomer.

Life

Brück went to school in Berlin-Charlottenburg and studied from 1924 at the University of Kiel , the University of Bonn and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he received his doctorate in physics under Arnold Sommerfeld in 1928, with a dissertation on the wave mechanics of crystals. Then he turned to astronomy and went to the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam with his friend Albrecht Unsöld , who had also received his doctorate from Sommerfeld. At the same time he attended the Physics Colloquium at the University of Berlin , which was attended by physicists such as Albert Einstein and Max von Laue .

Because of the political situation, he left Germany in 1936 and went to the Vatican observatory in Castel Gandolfo as an assistant . The theologians Romano Guardini and Johannes Pinsk accepted him into the Catholic Church this year. In the following year he went to the University of Cambridge to Arthur Eddington . He became Assistant Director of the Cambridge Observatory and John Couch Adams Astronomer . His specialty was solar spectroscopy. For example, he contributed to the Utrecht Solar Atlas.

In 1947 he went to Dublin as head of the Dunsink Observatory , which was assigned to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies , where Erwin Schrödinger was in charge of theoretical physics. In 1957 he moved to the University of Edinburgh as Regius Professor of Astronomy , where he headed the Royal Observatory (as Astronomer Royal for Scotland ). There, under (in the early years) Vincent Cartledge Reddish and Peter Fellgett, automated observation methods in stellar spectroscopy (with automatic scanning of the spectra and conversion into computer-readable punched tape) and remote control of telescopes were developed. He made Edinburgh a center for the technological development of observational astronomy. For observation he used his international contacts especially to Rome (with a Schmidt telescope on Monte Porzio near Rome in 1967) and the university also used a Schmidt telescope in Siding Spring in Australia. He was involved in setting up the telescope in La Palma, supervised by the Greenwich Observatory, and in setting up a 4 m infrared telescope in Hawaii, supervised by Edinburgh. He set up a course in astronomy and, like in Cambridge, founded a student astronomical society. He was temporarily dean and retired in 1975.

He was married to Mary Conway, who worked with him as an astronomer. She also taught in Edinburgh until her retirement in 1984. With his wife he wrote a biography of Charles Piazzi Smyth (1988) and the history of astronomy in Edinburgh (1983).

He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences , the Royal Irish Academy (1948), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1958) and the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature (1955). In 1966 he became CBE . He was a Grand Cross Knight of the Order of Gregory . He received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews (1973) and the National University of Ireland (1972). In 2014 the asteroid (10737) Brück was named after him.

Fonts

• with Mary Brück: The peripatetic astronomer: The life of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Adam Hilger 1988
• The story of astronomy in Edinburgh: from its beginning until 1975, Edinburgh University Press 1983
• Lord Crawford's Observatory at Dun Echt 1872-1892 , Vistas in Astronomy, Volume 35, 1992, pp. 81-138

Web links

• Publications by HA Brück in the Astrophysics Data System
• Obituary by Peter Brand in Astronomy and Geophysics, Volume 41, 2000

Individual evidence

1. ↑ MJ Rees: Hermann Alexander Brück , Commemorations of Academians, in: Science and the Future of Mankind - Science for Man and Man for Science , Proceedings of the Preparatory Session November 12-14, 1999 and the Jubilee Plenary Session November 10-13, 2000
2. ↑ Lorimer Medal for Mary Brück ( Memento of the original from January 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) 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. 
3. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 89388
4. ↑ James Ludovic Linday, Earl of Crawford (1847-1913). He had a private observatory in Dun Echt, Aberdeenshire. His foundations were instrumental in establishing the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh in 1896.