Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to the scientific knowledge about the structure of stars, stellar evolution and black holes. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics along with William A. Fowler for "...theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes. Many concepts, institutions and inventions, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are named after him.
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer was an English scientist and astronomer. Along with the French scientist Pierre Janssen, he is credited with discovering the gas helium. Lockyer also is remembered for being the founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature.
Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote Elements of Physical Manipulations.
William Lassell was an English merchant and astronomer. He is remembered for his improvements to the reflecting telescope and his ensuing discoveries of four planetary satellites.
William Frederick Denning was a British amateur astronomer who achieved considerable success without formal scientific training. He is known for his catalogues of meteor radiants, observations of Jupiter's red spot, and for the discovery of five comets. Outside astronomy, as a young man, Denning showed prowess at cricket to the extent W G Grace invited him to play for Gloucestershire. However Denning's retiring nature made him decline the offer.
A transit of Mercury across the Sun takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet. During a transit, Mercury appears as a tiny black dot moving across the Sun as the planet obscures a small portion of the solar disk. Because of orbital alignments, transits viewed from Earth occur in May or November. The last four such transits occurred on May 7, 2003; November 8, 2006; May 9, 2016; and November 11, 2019. The next will occur on November 13, 2032. A typical transit lasts several hours. Mercury transits are much more frequent than transits of Venus, with about 13 or 14 per century, primarily because Mercury is closer to the Sun and orbits it more rapidly.
Marcel Gilles Jozef Minnaert was a Belgian-Dutch astronomer. He was born in Bruges and died in Utrecht. He is notable for his contributions to astronomy and physics and for a popular book on meteorological optics: Light and colour in the open air, first published in English in 1940.
Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley OBE FRS was an English astronomer who became the eleventh Astronomer Royal. His mother's maiden name was Van der Riet.
Agnes Mary Clerke was an Irish astronomer and writer, mainly in the field of astronomy. She was born in Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland, and died in London.
S Doradus is one of the brightest stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located roughly 160,000 light-years away. The star is a luminous blue variable, and one of the most luminous stars known, having a luminosity varying widely above and below 1,000,000 times the luminosity of the Sun, although it is too far away to be seen with the naked eye.
The Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) is a digitized version of several photographic astronomical surveys of the night sky, produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute between 1983 and 2006.
Gamma Virginis, officially named Porrima, is a binary star system in the constellation of Virgo. It consists of two almost identical main sequence stars at a distance of about 38 light-years.
A B-type main-sequence star is a main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) star of spectral type B and luminosity class V. These stars have from 2 to 16 times the mass of the Sun and surface temperatures between 10,000 and 30,000 K. B-type stars are extremely luminous and blue. Their spectra have strong neutral helium absorption lines, which are most prominent at the B2 subclass, and moderately strong hydrogen lines. Examples include Regulus, Algol A and Acrux.
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal managed by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. It publishes research and review papers, instrumentation papers and dissertation summaries in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics. Between 1999 and 2016 it was published by the University of Chicago Press and since 2016, it has been published by IOP Publishing. The current editor-in-chief is Jeff Mangum of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Tau Canis Majoris is a multiple star system in the constellation Canis Major. It is approximately 5,000 light years distant from Earth and is the brightest member of the open cluster NGC 2362.
Astronomische Nachrichten, one of the first international journals in the field of astronomy, was established in 1821 by the German astronomer Heinrich Christian Schumacher. It claims to be the oldest astronomical journal in the world that is still being published. The publication today specializes in articles on solar physics, extragalactic astronomy, cosmology, geophysics, and instrumentation for these fields. All articles are subject to peer review.
Charles Thomas Bolton was an American-Canadian astronomer who was one of the first in his field to present strong evidence of the existence of a stellar-mass black hole.
3 Geminorum is a blue supergiant star in the constellation Gemini. It is a small amplitude pulsating variable and a close double star, with a mean combined apparent visual magnitude of about 5.7.
Mary Teresa Brück was an Irish astronomer, astrophysicist and historian of science, whose career was spent at Dunsink Observatory in Dublin and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in Scotland.
Aina Margareta Elvius was a Swedish astronomer known for her work on polarized light from galaxies and the nuclei of active galaxies. She was professor of astronomy at Stockholm University, director of the Stockholm Observatory, and the second Swedish woman to be elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
