Rudolph Minkowski (born Rudolf Leo Bernhard Minkowski ; ; May 28, 1895 – January 4, 1976) was a German-American
astronomer
An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies – in either ...
.
Biography
Minkowski was the son of Marie Johanna Siegel and physiologist
Oskar Minkowski
Oskar Minkowski (; 13 January 1858 – 18 July 1931) was a German physician and physiologist who held a professorship at the University of Breslau and is most famous for his research on diabetes. He was the brother of the mathematician Hermann M ...
. His uncle was
Hermann Minkowski, a mathematician and one of Einstein's teachers in Zürich. Rudolph studied
supernovae and, together with
Walter Baade
Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade (March 24, 1893 – June 25, 1960) was a German astronomer who worked in the United States from 1931 to 1959.
Biography
The son of a teacher, Baade finished school in 1912. He then studied maths, physics and astr ...
, divided them into two classes (
Type I and
Type II) based on their spectral characteristics. He and Baade also found optical counterparts to various
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...
sources.
He headed the
National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a photographic atlas of the entire northern sky (and down to
declination -22°) up to an apparent
magnitude
Magnitude may refer to:
Mathematics
*Euclidean vector, a quantity defined by both its magnitude and its direction
*Magnitude (mathematics), the relative size of an object
*Norm (mathematics), a term for the size or length of a vector
*Order of ...
of 22.
Together with
Albert George Wilson
Albert George Wilson (July 28, 1918 – August 27, 2012) was an American astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets.
He was born in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech in 1947; his thesis title was ''Axiall ...
, he co-discovered the near-Earth
Apollo asteroid
The Apollo asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids named after 1862 Apollo, discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s. They are Earth-crossing asteroids that have an orbital semi-major axis greater than that of the Earth ...
1620 Geographos
1620 Geographos (), provisional designation , is a highly elongated, stony asteroid, near-Earth object and potentially hazardous asteroid of the Apollo group, with a mean-diameter of approximately . It was discovered on 14 September 1951, by a ...
in 1951,
and he also discovered
Planetary Nebula M2-9. He additionally discovered a correlation between the luminosity of
early-type galaxies and their
velocity dispersion
In astronomy, the velocity dispersion (''σ'') is the statistical dispersion of velocities about the mean velocity for a group of astronomical objects, such as an open cluster, globular cluster, galaxy, galaxy cluster, or supercluster. By measurin ...
, which was later quantified by
Faber and Jackson. He won the
Bruce Medal
The Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy. It is named after Catherine Wolfe Bruce, an American patroness of astronomy, and was fi ...
in 1961.
The lunar crater ''
Minkowski'' is named after him and his uncle.
Also the
Minkowski 2-9, planetary nebula and the ''Minkowski's object'' dwarf galaxy near
NGC 541 are named after him.
Bibliography
*
See also
*
Hen 2-437
*
M2-42
References
External links
Short Biography*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Minkowski, Rudolph
1895 births
1976 deaths
20th-century American astronomers
Discoverers of asteroids
20th-century German astronomers
Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
People from Alsace-Lorraine
Scientists from Strasbourg