Pole swings
Polydore Ferdinand Félix "Pol" Swings (born September 24, 1906 in Ransart near Charleroi , † October 28, 1983 in Esneux ) was a Belgian astronomer and professor at the University of Liège .
Life
Swings received his doctorate from Marcel Dehalu (1873-1960) in Liège in 1927 with a dissertation on relativistic corrections to perihelion rotation. After a stay as a post-doctoral student in Paris ( Meudon Observatory , Sorbonne ), he turned to spectroscopy . In 1930 he stayed for further studies in Warsaw and in 1931 with Otto von Struve at the Yerkes Observatory in Chicago . In 1931 he founded a laboratory for spectroscopy at the Astrophysical Institute in Liège, where he met Subramanyan Chandrasekhar , with whom he also published together. In 1932 he became a lecturer and later a professor. In 1975 he retired.
He was in the USA during World War II at the Lick Observatory and also worked in the development of spectrographs for the military. He was visiting professor at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1951 . In 1952 and 1967 he was at the University of California (Berkeley) , in 1951 at the California Institute of Technology and in 1968 at the Laboratory for Astrophysics in Boulder and at the Harvard College Observatory . He was also a visiting scholar at the universities in Oslo and Toruń and in southern France.
Swings was mainly concerned with the spectroscopy of stars, interstellar clouds and comets . The Swings effect (shift of the spectral lines due to the Doppler effect in gases escaping from comets) and the Swings bands (group of emission lines in comet light) are named after him.
Pol Swings received the Francqui Prize in 1948 . He was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Aix-Marseille and Bordeaux as well as an officer of the Legion of Honor , Grand Office de la Couronne and commander of the Order of the Leopold . He was a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences , since 1956 of the Académie des Sciences in France and since 1967 a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. In 1965 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1966 to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society .
1964 to 1967 he was chairman of the International Astronomical Union .
The asteroid (1637) Swings is named after him.
Fonts
- Les essais de correction de la loi de Newton et les orbites à périhélie mouvant. Dissertation 1927
- La spectroscopie appliqué. 1935
Web links
- Obituary at the Belgian Academy of Sciences, pdf
- P. Swings: A Few Notes on My Career as an Astrophysicist. In: Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics Volume 17 (1979), pp. 1–7 (short autobiography, English)
- Publications by P. Swings in the Astrophysics Data System
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Swings, Pol |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Swings, Polydore Ferdinand Félix (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Belgian astronomer and professor at the University of Liège |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 24, 1906 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ransart |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 28, 1983 |
| Place of death | Esneux |