Gérard Henri de Vaucouleurs (25 April 1918 – 7 October 1995)[2][3] was a French astronomer best known for his studies of galaxies.[4]
Life and career
Gerard de Vaucouleurs was born on April 25, 1918 in Paris, he took the maiden name of his mother as his last name.[5] He had an early interest in amateur astronomy and received his undergraduate degree in 1939 at the Sorbonne in that city.
After military service in World War II, he resumed his pursuit of astronomy. He was married to fellow astronomer Antoinette de Vaucouleurs on October 31, 1944, and the couple would frequently collaborate on astronomical research.[6]
In 1960 he was appointed to the University of Texas at Austin, where he spent the rest of his career. He was one of the first five faculty in the newly formed astronomy department there.[4][6] His wife Antoinette died in 1987. In 1995 he died of a heart attack in his home in Austin at the age of 77.[3] At the time of his death he had a second wife named Elysabeth.[3][5]
Research
His earliest work had concerned the planet Mars and while at Harvard he used telescope observations from 1909 to 1958 to study the areographic coordinates of features on the surface of Mars.[7] His later work focused on the study of galaxies and he co-authored the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies with his wife Antoinette (1921-1987), a fellow UT Austin astronomer and lifelong collaborator.[6]
His specialty included reanalyzing Hubble and Sandage's galaxy atlas and recomputing the distance measurements utilizing a method of averaging many different kinds of metrics such as luminosity, the diameters of ring galaxies, brightest star clusters, etc., in a method he called "spreading the risks." During the 1950s he promoted the idea that galactic clusters are grouped into superclusters.[3]
^Burbidge, E. Margaret (2002). "GÉRARD DE VAUCOULEURS 1918–1995"(PDF). Biographical Memoirs. 82. National Academy of Sciences – via National Academy of Sciences Online.
^de Vaucouleurs, Gerard (1963). "Precision Mapping of Mars". La Physique des Planetes; Communications Presentees au Onzieme Colloque International d'Astrophysique tenu a Liège, les 9, 10 et 11 Juillet 1962. Vol. 11. pp. 369–385. Bibcode:1963LIACo..11..369D. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
