Martin schwarzschild

Martin Schwarzschild (May 31, 1912 - April 10, 1997) was a German-American astronomer.

Early Years

Schwarzschild was born in Potsdam into a distinguished German-Jewish academic family. He is the son of physicist Karl Schwarzschild and nephew of astrophysicist Robert Emden. After the death of his father the family moved to Göttingen in 1916. He studied at the University of Göttingen and took his doctoral examination in December 1936. He left Germany in 1936 for Norway and then the United States. Joined. There, Schwarzschild served in US Army intelligence, for which he was awarded the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star for his wartime service. After returning to the United States, he married fellow astronomer Barbara Cherry.

Professional career

His work is based on stellar structure and stellar evolution.

His investigations in these two fields led to a better understanding of pulsars, differential solar rotation, post-main sequence evolutionary clues in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (including how stars become red giants), the sources of the hydrogen shell, the helium flash, and the ages of star clusters.

With Fred Hoyle, he calculated some of the first stellar models to correctly ascend the branch of the red giant by constantly burning hydrogen in a shell around the core.

He and Härm were the first to calculate stellar models that went through thermal pulses in the giant asymptotic branch and later showed that these models develop convective zones between the layers that burn helium and hydrogen, which can bring nuclear ash to the visible surface. Schwarzschild's 1958 book Structure and Evolution of Stars taught a generation of astrophysicists how to apply electronic computers to the calculation of stellar models.

In the 1950s and 1960s, he led the Stratoscope projects, which took instrumented balloons to unprecedented heights. The first Stratoscope obtained high-resolution images of solar granules and sunspots, confirming the existence of convection in the solar atmosphere, and the second obtained infrared spectra of planets, red giant stars, and galaxy nuclei. In his last years he made important contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of elliptical galaxies.

In the 1980s, Schwarzschild applied his numerical skills to build models of triaxial galaxies.

Membership

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1954)
• United States National Academy of Sciences (1956)
• American Philosophical Society (1981)
• Foreign Member of the Royal Society

Acknowledgments and Awards

• Professor Emeritus of Astronomy Eugene Higgins at Princeton University.
• Chair Henry Norris Russell (1960)
• Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1960)
• Medalla Bruce (1965)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1969)
• The asteroid (4463) Marschwarzschild was named in his honor.