Ludwig Becker (astronomer)

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Ludwig Wilhelm Emil Ernst Becker (born January 8, 1860 in Wesel ; † November 11, 1947 in Meran , Italy ) was a German - British astronomer and university professor. He was director of the University Observatory in Glasgow ( Regius Professor of Astronomy ).

Life

Ludwig Becker studied at the universities of Berlin and Bonn and received his doctorate in 1882 for Dr. phil. After two years as an assistant at the Astronomical Computing Institute of the Berlin observatory , the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres appointed him in 1885 to head his large private observatory in Dunecht near Aberdeen in Scotland . When this institution was dissolved in the fall of 1888, Becker went to the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill in Edinburgh in 1889 . In 1893 Ludwig Becker became director and professor at the observatory at the University of Glasgow . Although Becker was a British citizen, he had to retire from university service in the First World War due to the hostility to Germany and did not return to Glasgow until the end of the war. According to his contemporaries, he was so popular with his students that it was believed that he was giving the best-attended astronomy lectures in Britain during this period. In 1935 Ludwig Becker left the University of Glasgow. He died in Italy after World War II.

plant

Ludwig Becker's research areas were extensive, with particular specializing in celestial mechanics . For example, he investigated the distribution of blue-violet light in the solar corona during the solar eclipse of August 30, 1905 in Tunisia or made a trapping hypothesis in relation to binary stars, in which he showed how such a system could trap a third star and thereby one of its own components, and how one can explain the hypothesis of the high eccentricities of binary star orbits.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ludwig Becker Cartoon & Poem Glasgow University Archive Services, 1899
  2. ^ Who, What and Where: The History and Constitution of the University of Glasgow . Compiled by Michael Moss, Moira Rankin and Lesley Richmond, undated