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| Interactive Fun! |
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View the life cycle and family portrait of stars. http://aspire.cosmic-ray.org/labs/star_life/hr_interactive.html View an HR diagram simulator. http://www.astro.ubc.ca/~scharein/a311/Sim/hr/HRdiagram.html |
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| Ejnar Hertzsprung Biography | Adding Fun | |||
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Ejnar Hertzsprung was born October 8, 1873 in Frederiksberg, a city near Copenhagen Denmark. Hertzsprung started out as a chemical engineer. His formal studies never included astronomy. By 1902, he finally studied astronomy because of his interest in the chemistry of photography. He used these skills to determine the measurement of starlight. Shortly thereafter, Hertzsprung published papers stating his theory about the relationship between the colors and brightness of stars. This also proved the existence of giant and dwarf stars. The relationship between the color and brightness became a method of discovering the "spectroscopic parallaxes of stars (estimates of their distances from the Earth)". The reliable index of absolute magnitude allows the distance of stars to be determined. In 1913, he developed the scale of Cepheid variable stars which is a tool used for measurement of intergalactic distances. His accomplishment served as a fundamental building block to modern astronomy. Hertzsprung's work garnered him a spot on the staff of Göttingen Observatory. Later, he moved to become a director of the university observatory in Leiden, the Netherlands. After twenty six years, Hertzsprung retired and returned to Denmark. He died on October 21, 1967. |
Henry Norris Russell, the second half of the Hertzsprung Russell duo, served as one of the most influential American astronomers of the early 20th century. He was born on October 25, 1877 in Oyster Bay, New York. Russell was raised in a mathematically inclined family. In 1900, he graduated from Princeton University with his Ph.D. Unlike Hertzsprung, Russell was almost completely trained in the math and sciences. His Ph.D. thesis covered traditional mathematical astronomy. He later spent a few years studying at the University of Cambridge. There he developed "one of the first photographic parallax programs for determining distances to stars." Russell returned to Princeton as a teacher five years later. He was allowed to find new problems and use his math talents to solve them, an extremely uncommon practice for the time. Also unlike Hertzsprung, Russell never life his position at Princeton. He worked through a variety of positions, though his passion remained research. In his research, Russell continued to study stellar evolution. He found similar result to Hertzsprung that the brightness and colors of stars were related. A few stars did not follow the traditional pattern. Russell was able to come up with the relationship between these stars and the rest of the spectrum. These results combined with Hertzsprung's work were published in 1914 as the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram. Russell continued to research and contribute to the evolution of astronomical discoveries. He died on February 18, 1957 in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Sources www.britannica.com www.astro.psu.edu www.le.ac.uk www.bigear.org www.aetheoraem.com www.sci.esa.int www.homepages.wmich.edu | ||||
| All Content provided by Jessica O'Hara | ||||
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