Douglas Gough

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Douglas Owen Gough FRS (born 8 February 1941) [1] is a British astronomer, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Astrophysics in the University of Cambridge, and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. [2]

Contents

Life

Gough was educated at Hackney Downs School before attending the University of Cambridge (St John's College) where he studied at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). He subsequently worked with John Cox at JILA (Colorado) from 1966 to 1967, at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and with Edward Spiegel at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York from 1967 to 1969. He returned to Cambridge in 1969 to join the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy and DAMTP. He was director of the Institute of Astronomy from 1999 to 2004, deputy director from 1993 to 1999. He has been a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1972, a Science Research Council Senior Fellow (1978–1983), a Fellow Adjoint of JILA since 1986, an honorary professor of astronomy at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London (1986–2009), and a visiting professor of physics (now consulting professor) at Stanford University since 1996. [3] [4] He was appointed distinguished visiting professor at the University of Mumbai in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a Mousquetaire d'Armagnac. He is married to Rosanne; they have four children: Kim McCabe, Heidi Rose, Julian Gough and Russell Gough, and seven grandchildren.

Scientific work

Gough began his career working mainly on the problem of convection in stars and how it interacts with stellar pulsations. His best known works from this period include the a criterion for the inhibition of convection by magnetic fields in stars, [5] the application of the anelastic approximation to stellar atmospheres, [6] and a model of convection [7] that is the foundation of methods still used today to model the interaction of convection and pulsations in classical variable stars [8] and in the Sun. [9] In 1976, he and his PhD student Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard predicted that the global oscillation frequencies of the Sun could be used to infer its deep structure. [10] This is regarded as the beginning of what became known as helioseismology and, by extension, asteroseismology [11] of solar-like oscillators; Gough and Christensen-Dalsgaard are regarded as the "fathers" of the field. Gough and his students subsequently published extensively on the internal structure of the Sun and the calculation thereof, including determining features like the depth of the solar convection zone, [12] the Sun's interior rotation, [13] the protosolar helium abundance [14] and the main-sequence age. [15] He pioneered seismological investigation into the equation of state in the Sun and the helium abundance in stellar convection zones. [16] [17]

His doctoral students have included the Raja of Mahmudabad, Chris Jones, Douglas N. C. Lin, John Gribbin, Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard, Michael Thompson, Margarida Cunha, Marcus Brüggen and Pascale Garaud.

Honours and awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asteroseismology</span> Study of oscillations in stars

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Helioseismology, a term coined by Douglas Gough, is the study of the structure and dynamics of the Sun through its oscillations. These are principally caused by sound waves that are continuously driven and damped by convection near the Sun's surface. It is similar to geoseismology, or asteroseismology, which are respectively the studies of the Earth or stars through their oscillations. While the Sun's oscillations were first detected in the early 1960s, it was only in the mid-1970s that it was realized that the oscillations propagated throughout the Sun and could allow scientists to study the Sun's deep interior. The modern field is separated into global helioseismology, which studies the Sun's resonant modes directly, and local helioseismology, which studies the propagation of the component waves near the Sun's surface.

Professor Roger John Tayler OBE FRS was a British astronomer. Tayler made important contributions to stellar structure and evolution, plasma stability, nucleogenesis and cosmology. He wrote a number of textbooks. He collaborated with Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge on problems of helium production in cosmology.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red-giant branch</span> Portion of the giant branch before helium ignition

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard</span> Danish astronomer (born 1950)

Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard is a Danish astronomer at Aarhus University in Denmark. He specializes in asteroseismology and helioseismology. He has made significant contributions to both fields, including predicting the oscillation of Sun-like stars in 1983. He is the head of "Rumudvalget" and the Stellar Astrophysics Centre (SAC) supported by the Danish National Research Foundation. He is co-investigator on the Kepler mission and, with Hans Kjeldsen in Aarhus, leads the 500+ researchers in the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC). KASC is responsible for the asteroseismology component of the Kepler mission. Christensen-Dalsgaard has published several papers on this subject. He was also previously the president of Commission 27 of the International Astronomical Union.

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References

  1. ↑ GOUGH, Prof. Douglas Owen, Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014
  2. ↑ "International Astronomical Union | IAU". www.iau.org.
  3. ↑ "Douglas Gough | JILA NIST-CU". Archived from the original on 19 April 2012. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
  4. ↑ "Prof Douglas O Gough | Institute of Astronomy". www.ast.cam.ac.uk.
  5. ↑ Gough, D. O.; Tayler, R. J. (1966), "The influence of a magnetic field on Schwarzschild's criterion for convective instability in an ideally conducting fluid", MNRAS, 133: 85–98, Bibcode:1966MNRAS.133...85G, doi: 10.1093/mnras/133.1.85
  6. ↑ Gough, D. O. (1969), "The Anelastic Approximation for Thermal Convection.", Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 26 (3): 448–456, Bibcode:1969JAtS...26..448G, doi: 10.1175/1520-0469(1969)026<0448:taaftc>2.0.co;2
  7. ↑ Gough, D. O. (1977), "Mixing-length theory for pulsating stars", Astrophysical Journal, 214: 196, Bibcode:1977ApJ...214..196G, doi: 10.1086/155244
  8. ↑ Baker, N. H.; Gough, D. O. (1979), "Pulsations of model RR Lyrae stars", Astrophysical Journal, 232: 224–244, Bibcode:1979ApJ...234..232B, doi: 10.1086/157492
  9. ↑ Balmforth, N. J. (1992), "Solar pulsational stability - I. Pulsation-mode thermodynamics", MNRAS, 255 (4): 603–649, Bibcode:1992MNRAS.255..603B, doi: 10.1093/mnras/255.4.603
  10. ↑ Christensen-Dalsgaard, J.; Gough, D. O. (1976), "Towards a heliological inverse problem", Nature, 259 (5539): 89–92, Bibcode:1976Natur.259...89C, doi:10.1038/259089a0, S2CID   10540902
  11. ↑ Gough, D. O. (1996), "Astereoasteroseismology", The Observatory, 116: 313–315, Bibcode:1996Obs...116..313G
  12. ↑ Christensen-Dalsgaard, J.; Gough, D. O.; Thompson, M. J. (1991), "The depth of the solar convection zone" (PDF), Astrophysical Journal, 378: 413, Bibcode:1991ApJ...378..413C, doi:10.1086/170441
  13. ↑ Duvall, Jr. T. L.; Dziembowski, W. A.; Goode, P. R.; Gough, D. O.; Harvey, J. W.; Leibacher, J. W. (1984), "Internal rotation of the sun", Nature, 310 (5972): 22–25, Bibcode:1984Natur.310...22D, doi:10.1038/310022a0, S2CID   4310140
  14. ↑ Gough, D. O. (1983), "The protosolar helium abundance", Primordial Helium, ed. P.A. Shaver, D. Kunth & K. Kjaer, European Southern Observatory: 117–136, Bibcode:1983prhe.work..117G
  15. ↑ Houdek, G.; Gough, D. O. (2011), "On the seismic age and heavy-element abundance of the Sun", MNRAS, 418 (2): 1217–1230, arXiv: 1108.0802 , Bibcode:2011MNRAS.418.1217H, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.19572.x
  16. ↑ Gough, D. O. (1990), Progress of Seismology of the Sun and Stars, Lecture Notes in Physics, vol. 267, pp. 283–318, Bibcode:1990LNP...367..283G, doi:10.1007/3-540-53091-6, ISBN   978-3-540-53091-6
  17. ↑ Houdek, G.; Gough, D. O. (2007), "An asteroseismic signature of helium ionization", MNRAS, 375 (3): 861–880, arXiv: astro-ph/0612030 , Bibcode:2007MNRAS.375..861H, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.11325.x
  18. ↑ "SolarNews August 1994". August 1994.
  19. ↑ "Previous winners of the George Ellery Hale Prize". Archived from the original on 13 August 2013. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
  20. ↑ "News: Society for the History of Astronomy; short-term contract information sought; more asteroids than ever; state of the union; Society medals for Jacobs Mestel and Gough; RAS grants announcement; spidermen; new faces for the Planetary Forum; an RAS Council member.", Astronomy and Geophysics, 43 (3): c4, 2002, Bibcode:2002A&G....43c...4., doi: 10.1046/j.1468-4004.2002.43304.x
  21. ↑ "Awards: RAS Awards 2010; Prof. John Woodhouse; Prof. Douglas Gough; Prof. Bernard Roberts; Prof. James Hough; Dr Ineke De Moortel; Dr Barbara Ercolano", Astronomy and Geophysics, 51 (1): a37, 2010, Bibcode:2010A&G....51a..37., doi: 10.1111/j.1468-4004.2010.51137.x
  22. ↑ Crafoord Prize 2024
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