Willem Jacob Luyten
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Willem Jacob Luyten (March 7, 1899 – November 21, 1994) was a Dutch-American astronomer.<ref name="whoswho">
"Willem Jacob Luyten", Marquis Who's Who, 2006.
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Life
Jacob Luyten was born in Semarang, Java, at the time part of the Dutch East Indies.<ref name="obit_pasp"/> His mother was Cornelia M. Francken and his father Jacob Luyten, a teacher of French.
At the age of 11 he observed Halley's Comet, which started his fascination with astronomy. He also had a knack for languages, and eventually could speak nine. In 1912 his family moved back to the Netherlands where he studied astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, receiving his BA in 1918.
He was the first student to earn his PhD (at the age of 22) with Ejnar Hertzsprung at Leiden University. In 1921 he left for the United States where he first worked at the Lick Observatory. From 1923 to 1930 Luyten worked at the Harvard College Observatory eventually working at the observatory's Bloemfontein station in South Africa. He spent the years 1928–1930 in Bloemfontein, where he met Willemina H. Miedema and married her on February 5, 1930.
Upon his return to the United States in 1931, he taught at the University of Minnesota from 1931–1967, then served as astronomer emeritus from 1967 until his death.
Luyten studied the proper motions of stars and discovered many white dwarfs. He appears to have been the first to use the term white dwarf when he examined this class of stars in 1922.<ref> Template:Cite journal </ref><ref> Template:Cite journal</ref><ref> Template:Cite journal </ref><ref> Template:Cite journal </ref> He also discovered some of the Sun's nearest neighbors, including Luyten's Star as well as the high–proper motion binary star system Luyten 726-8, which was soon found to contain the remarkable flare star UV Ceti.
He catalogued 17,000 high-proper motion stars in the Luyten Two-Tenths Arcsecond Catalog.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Well after his death, an exoplanet was discovered orbiting one of them, LTT 1445A.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Honors
Awards
- James Craig Watson Medal (1964)
- Bruce Medal (1968)
Named after him
References
External links
- 1899 births
- 1994 deaths
- 20th-century Dutch astronomers
- 20th-century American astronomers
- Dutch emigrants to the United States
- Harvard University staff
- People from Semarang
- University of Amsterdam alumni
- Leiden University alumni
- University of Minnesota faculty
- Harvard College Observatory people
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Dutch people of the Dutch East Indies