Willem Jacob Luyten | |
|---|---|
 Luyten in 1971 | |
| Born | (1899-03-07)March 7, 1899 |
| Died | November 21, 1994(1994-11-21) (aged 95) Minneapolis, United States |
| Alma mater | Leiden University |
| Awards | James Craig Watson Medal(1964) Bruce Medal(1968) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | astronomy |
| Institutions | Lick Observatory, Harvard College Observatory University of Minnesota |
| Doctoral advisor | Ejnar Hertzsprung |
Willem Jacob Luyten (March 7, 1899 – November 21, 1994) was a Dutch-Americanastronomer.[1][2][3][4][5]
Jacob Luyten was born inSemarang,Java, at the time part of theDutch East Indies.[2] His mother was Cornelia M. Francken and his father Jacob Luyten, a teacher of French.
At the age of 11 he observedHalley'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 theUniversity of Amsterdam, receiving his BA in 1918.
He was the first student to earn his PhD (at the age of 22) withEjnar Hertzsprung atLeiden University. In 1921 he left for the United States where he first worked at theLick Observatory. From 1923 to 1930 Luyten worked at theHarvard College Observatory eventually working at the observatory'sBloemfontein 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 theUniversity of Minnesota from 1931–1967, then served as astronomer emeritus from 1967 until his death.
Luyten studied theproper motions of stars and discovered manywhite dwarfs. He appears to have been the first to use the termwhite dwarf when he examined this class of stars in 1922.[6][7][8][9] He also discovered some of the Sun's nearest neighbors, includingLuyten's Star as well as the high–proper motion binary star systemLuyten 726-8, which was soon found to contain the remarkableflare starUV Ceti.
He catalogued 17,000 high-proper motion stars in the Luyten Two-Tenths Arcsecond Catalog.[10] Well after his death, an exoplanet was discovered orbiting one of them,LTT 1445A.[11]
Awards
Named after him
