Thomas Cowling

Thomas George Cowling ( born June 17, 1906 in Walthamstow, Essex / England; † 16 June 1990) was a British astronomer and mathematician.

Life and work

He studied from 1924 with a fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford University, where he graduated in mathematics in 1927 made ​​with top marks. 1928-1930 he was there the first student of the astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne. He then worked for three years at Imperial College in London as an assistant to Sydney Chapman and subsequently taught at the Universities of Swansea ( Assistant Lecturer from 1933), Dundee ( 1937 Lecturer ), Manchester ( from 1939 Lecturer ) and Bangor, where he from 1945 professor was. In 1948, he joined as a professor to the University of Leeds and remained there until his death, although he officially retired in 1970.

As assistant of Sydney Chapman wrote this a known monograph on the statistical mechanics of gases, first appeared in 1939.

He was mainly active in the field of stellar astrophysics and was considered an expert on the internal structure of stars. He developed in the 1930s named after him a stellar model, not usually assumed to radiation transport, but in the inner core by convection in which was the energy transport in the interior as it was then. Also in the 1930s he developed independently by Ludwig Biermann improved boundary conditions for stellar models similar to the sun, where there was indeed outside convection, the energy transport on the surface but once done by radiation (which was taken into account in the boundary conditions ).

Cowling also dealt with MGD, about which he wrote a textbook. In 1933 he showed that the magnetic fields, for example in sunspots need a dynamo mechanism for the generation, otherwise they would have long faded away .. At the same time he showed that they generated fields could not be axially symmetric, thus disproving a hypothesis by Joseph Larmor. Examples of non- axisymmetric dynamo fields, for example, for the earth's magnetic field or the magnetic fields of sunspots were not found until much later. In 1945, he showed the other hand, that some magnetic fields, especially in very massive stars can have a lifetime that exceeds the lifetime of the star itself. He is also known for a work of non - radial oscillations in stars.

Awards

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1947. Since 1931 he was a member from 1965 to 1967 and President of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Writings

  • Magnetohydrodynamics, Interscience 1957, 2nd edition, Hilger 1977
  • With Sydney Chapman: Mathematical theory of nonuniform gases, Cambridge University Press 1939, 1952, 1970
  • Molecules in motion, Hutchinson 's University Library, London, New York 1950
  • With Horace Babcock general magnetic fields in the sun and in the stars, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 113, 1953, pp. 357-381, online
  • Solar electrodynamics, in Gerard Peter Kuiper (Editor) The Sun, University of Chicago Press, 1953
  • Magnetic Stars, in LH Aller, DB McLaughlin Stellar Structure, University of Chicago Press 1965
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