Jan Oort
Jan Hendrik Oort ( born April 28, 1900 in Franeker, † November 5, 1992 in Leiden ) was a Dutch astronomer.
Life
Oort studied at the University of Groningen. There he was taught by Jacobus C. Kapteyn. Since 1924 he worked at the observatory suffering. From 1945 to 1970 he was a professor at the University of Leiden. At the same time he was also director of the Leiden Observatory.
In 1927, confirmed Oort and his colleagues with the Oort rotation formulas, the hypothesis of Bertil Lindblad on the rotation of our galaxy ( Milky Way ), the first Immanuel Kant had proposed in 1755. Oort located the center of the Milky Way 30,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius (The Archer ). He showed that the Milky Way has a mass of 100 billion solar masses.
In the 1950s, Oort postulated an area commonly known as the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system, from which the comet. Oorts theories to have never been confirmed, but are generally accepted.
Oort showed the polarization of the radiation from the Crab Nebula and recognized as synchrotron radiation.
From 1958 to 1961, Oort President of the International Astronomical Union.