Karl-Heinz Böhm (astronomer)

Karl-Heinz Böhm (born September 27, 1923 in Hamburg ; † March 2, 2014 ) was a German astronomer.

Böhm was the son of a merchant marine. During the Second World War, Böhm served on submarines. After the war he first worked in mining and in an automobile factory before studying physics in Darmstadt and Kiel from 1947. In 1954 he did his doctorate in Kiel with Albrecht Unsöld . In his dissertation, he demonstrated that there must be an additional non-radiation-related heating mechanism in the solar atmosphere. As a post-doctoral student , he was at the Lick Observatory . There he was influenced by George Herbig , who did research on very young stars. In the following ten years he was often at the University of Berkeley with Louis Henyey , who did computer calculations early on to study the star structure. One advantage of staying in the US was that it was much easier to access computers at the time. In Germany Böhm was with his wife, the astronomer Erika Böhm-Vitense , at the University of Kiel and the University of Heidelberg. In 1968 he became a professor at the University of Washington , where his wife Erika Böhm-Vitense also became a professor.

In the 1960s he dealt with the structure and atmosphere of white dwarfs, Herbig Haro objects and T-Tauri stars . He was both a theorist and an observing astronomer. Among other things, he observed at the Hale Observatory and the Calar Alto Observatory with the spectrograph by Josef Solf .

In 1958 he received the Physics Prize from the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . He was an external member of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and a frequent guest there. He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1980). In 1984/85 he was a visiting scientist at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics .

He had two sons and two daughters.

Web links

• Obituary AAS by George Wallerstein (originally in Physics Today 2014)