Martin Schwarzschild
Martin Schwarzschild ( born May 31, 1912 in Potsdam, † April 10, 1997 in Langhorne, Pennsylvania) was an American astrophysicist German origin.
Martin Schwarzschild was born as the son of the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild. Soon after his death in 1916 his family moved back to Göttingen, where his father had worked for long. Martin Schwarzschild studied there and in Berlin and received his doctorate in 1935 in Göttingen with Hans Kienle on the pulsation of δ Cephei stars. Shortly thereafter, he left because of his Jewish origin Nazi Germany, to settle according to different intermediate stations in the United States, whose citizens he was in 1942. In 1947 he was appointed professor at Princeton University, where he remained connected to his retirement in 1979 also.
Main field of Schwarzschild was the stellar evolution, their theoretical modeling with the development of computer technology made great progress since the 1950s. Starting with a first model of the structure of the Sun from 1946 he developed structure and evolution of stars in ever wider areas of the Hertzsprung- Russell diagram.
Based on the role of convection in stellar atmospheres and observations of the granulation of the solar photosphere, he turned his interest to even the highest resolution observations. With Lyman Spitzer and James Van Allen, he developed the concept of a balloon -borne telescope into the stratosphere, which should be above a major part of the seeing allow diffraction-limited image quality. The projects Strato Scope I and II, he realized this idea in the late 1950s and 1960s, and achieved high-resolution recording not only the sun but also other objects such as galaxies, whose quality has been surpassed in some cases only by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Schwarzschild worked since the 1970s, also on questions of the dynamics of galaxies. He developed a method to construct self consistent models of elliptical galaxies by superposition of many orbits of stars.
Works (selection)
- Structure and Evolution of the Stars, 1958