Waltraut Seitter
Waltraut Carola Seitter (born January 13, 1930 in Zwickau ; † November 15, 2007 in Schalkenmehren ) was a German astronomer and the first female professor of astronomy in Germany.
Life
Waltraut Seitter was born in Zwickau, where her father was an engineer at the Horch -Werke. She went to school in Cologne, where - in addition to working as a tram conductor, refugee helper and technical draftsman - she passed her Abitur in 1949 and then began studying physics, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. A Fulbright scholarship led her to Smith College , Northampton (Massachusetts) (USA), where she became an astronomy instructor after earning a Master of Arts in physics in 1955 . From 1958 to 1962 she worked at the Hoher List observatory at the Bonn University Observatory . After completing her doctorate in 1962, she worked for two more years as a research assistant and assistant in Bonn before she was appointed observer in 1965 and principal observator and adjunct professor at the University of Bonn in 1969. In 1967 she was visiting professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville ( Tennessee ), then as a full professor at Smith College (from 1973 Eliza Appleton Haven Professor of Astronomy). In 1975 she was appointed professor and director of the Astronomical Institute at the University of Münster , which she headed until her retirement in 1995. She was the first woman to hold a chair for astronomy in Germany.
In Bonn she worked on problems of stellar statistics and the spectral classification of stars (Bonn Spectral Atlas) as well as eruptive stars. In Münster, in addition to teaching, the focus was on moving to a new building with an improvement in the infrastructure. However, concentration measures by the then Minister for Science and Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia led to the restriction of funds and finally to the closure of the institute in 1997.
Waltraut Seitter and a team of graduate and doctoral students worked on the Muenster Redshift Project, supported by the German Research Foundation , on the large-scale distribution of galaxies and a galaxy survey of the southern sky. The first indications for the work of the cosmological constant were given in a paper submitted in early 1997, before the discovery was announced by US scientists the following year.
In 1980 she organized a conference of the Astronomical Society in Münster, and in 1993 an international conference as part of the NATO Advanced Study Institute. From 1990 to 1996 she was part of the editorial team of Die Sterne magazine . After her retirement, she found the opportunity to continue some of her work in the USA and Chile.
The asteroid (4893) Seitter was named after her.
Since 1975 she was married to the astronomer Hilmar W. Duerbeck .
Publications
- Two-Color Charts and Stellar Statistics Questions , 1962
- The spectrum of the Nova Herculis 1963: After lens prism recordings at the Hoher List observatory , 1963
- Bonn Spectral Atlas I, II , 1970, 1975
- Large-scale structures in the universe: observational and analytical methods , 1988
- Cosmological aspects of X-ray clusters of galaxies , 1994
Web links
- Publications by WC Seitter in the Astrophysics Data System
- Asteroid (4893) Seitter
- Dirk Lorenzen : Germany's first female astronomer , broadcast on November 14, 2012 in the Sternzeit series of Deutschlandfunk
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seitter, Waltraut |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Seitter, Waltraut Carola |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 13, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Zwickau |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 15, 2007 |
| Place of death | Schalkenmehren |