Russell gave lectures around the country, often emphasizing the importance of understanding modern physics in order to grasp what was happening in astronomy. That book set the scene for the kind of textbook you are now reading, which not only lays out the facts of astronomy but also explains how they fit together. He and two colleagues wrote a textbook for college astronomy classes that helped train astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts over several decades. He was an influential teacher and popularizer of astronomy, writing a column on astronomical topics for Scientific American magazine for more than 40 years. Russell also made important contributions in the study of binary stars and the measurement of star masses, the origin of the solar system, the atmospheres of planets, and the measurement of distances in astronomy, among other fields. Russell embarked on a lifelong quest to ascertain the physical conditions inside stars from the clues in their spectra his work inspired, and was continued by, a generation of astronomers, many trained by Russell and his collaborators. Russell began to see that interpreting the spectra of stars required a much more sophisticated understanding of the physics of the atom, a subject that was being developed by European physicists in the 1910s and 1920s. He was fond of recounting that both his mother and his maternal grandmother had won prizes in mathematics, and that he probably inherited his talents in that field from their side of the family.īefore Russell, American astronomers devoted themselves mainly to surveying the stars and making impressive catalogs of their properties, especially their spectra (as described in Analyzing Starlight. He lived in the same house in that town until his death in 1957 (interrupted only by a brief stay in Europe for graduate work). When he was 12, his family sent him to live with an aunt in Princeton so he could attend a top preparatory school. His 264 papers were enormously influential in many areas of astronomy.īorn in 1877, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Russell showed early promise. In outward appearance, he was an old-fashioned product of the nineteenth century who wore high-top black shoes and high starched collars, and carried an umbrella every day of his life. He was nervous, active, competitive, critical, and very articulate he tended to dominate every meeting he attended. His memory was so phenomenal, he could correctly quote an enormous number of poems and limericks, the entire Bible, tables of mathematical functions, and almost anything he had learned about astronomy. His students later remembered him as a man whose thinking was three times faster than just about anybody else’s. When Henry Norris Russell graduated from Princeton University, his work had been so brilliant that the faculty decided to create a new level of honors degree beyond “summa cum laude” for him. This investigation, and a similar independent study in 1911 by Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung, led to the extremely important discovery that the temperature and luminosity of stars are related ( Figure 18.13). In 1913, American astronomer Henry Norris Russell plotted the luminosities of stars against their spectral classes (a way of denoting their surface temperatures). Or you might have a very tall, skinny fashion model with great height but relatively small weight, who would be found near the upper right.Ī similar diagram has been found extremely useful for understanding the lives of stars. You occasionally see a short human who is very overweight and would thus be more to the bottom left of our diagram than the average sequence of people. And, of course, there are some dramatic exceptions. It’s not mathematically exact-there is a wide range of variation-but it’s not a bad overall rule. Typically, if we have bigger bones, we have more flesh to fill out our larger frame. This makes sense if you are familiar with the structure of human beings. Generally speaking, taller human beings weigh more, whereas shorter ones weigh less. We can conclude from this graph that human height and weight are related. Most points lie along a “main sequence” representing most people, but there are a few exceptions. The plot of the heights and weights of a representative group of human beings.
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