Who is lyman spitzer

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UTC Offset:. Picture of the Day Image Galleries. Watch : Mining the Moon for rocket fuel. Queen guitarist Brian May and David Eicher launch new astronomy book. Last chance to join our Costa Rica Star Party! Learn about the Moon in a great new book New book chronicles the space program.

Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Groups Why Join? Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. Though the Hubble Space Telescope was named after Edwin Hubble, we might not have any space telescopes including Hubble without the renowned astrophysicist Lyman Strong Spitzer.

The official portrait of astrophysicist Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. Who was Lyman Spitzer? Proposing a space-based observatory In , after becoming part of a think-tank set up by the U. The interstellar medium is made up of gas and dust that blocks visible light coming from behind it.

Although the interstellar medium can be a nuisance for astronomers, it also leads to the beautiful dark splotches we see when we look up at the Milky Way from a dark-sky site. A long road to Hubble By the early s, Spitzer revived his push for a large, space-based telescope, which seemed tantalizingly possible following the birth of NASA in After a strong campaign led by Spitzer, the Senate finally restored half the initial budget in Unfortunately the launch was delayed due to the late supply of some elements and the Challenger tragedy of Finally HST was launched in , but soon after a major flaw was detected in the primary mirror and astronomers had to wait until the first maintenance mission in before they could access its full observation capability.

Spitzer received numerous awards for his achievements, including the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy. He retired in but remained involved in astronomical and astrophysical research, and a member of the Space Telescope Institute Council, until his sudden death in After his death, the AAC created a Lyman Spitzer Climbing Grant, awarded annually to expeditions that attempt 'the most challenging routes in the world's great mountain ranges'.

The asteroid Spitzer is also named after him. You have already liked this page, you can only like it once! From interstellar dust to plasma physics Spitzer made one of his first discoveries by comparing elliptical and spiral galaxies; while the first contain old stars and only traces of interstellar gas, the latter contain large amounts of gas and young stars. Like Thank you for liking You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!

Focus on. This approach is necessary in discussing containment by magnetic mirrors and the lack of it in a simple torus. A rapid treatment of the Boltzmann equation, in an appendix, brings us in Chapter 2 to the transport equation for a fluid. This is joined with Maxwell 's equations, and the simple limits of high and low magnetic fields are briefly considered.

There is a chapter on The best chapter deals with encounters between charged particles and the resultant macroscopic phenomena: diffusion, electrical and thermal conductivities, relaxation times for densities and energies.

This summarizes some of the author's own researches and the results in that chapter are frequently referred to in papers. Two years later Spitzer published the paper The stellarator concept describing further results from his Laboratory. He introduced the paper by writing:- The basic concepts of the controlled thermonuclear program at Project Matterhorn, Princeton University, are discussed.

In particular, the theory of confinement of a fully ionized gas in the magnetic configuration of the stellarator is given, the theories of heating are outlined, and the bearing of observational results on these theories is described.

He then goes on to give further details:- Magnetic confinement in the stellarator is based on a strong magnetic field produced by solenoidal coils encircling a toroidal tube. The configuration is characterized by a 'rotational transform', such that a single line of magnetic force, followed around the system, intersects a cross-sectional plane in points which successively rotate about the magnetic axis. A theorem by Kruskal is used to prove that each line of force in such a system generates a toroidal surface; ideally the wall is such a surface.

A rotational transform may be generated either by a solenoidal field in a twisted, or figure-eight shaped, tube, or by the use of an additional transverse multipolar helical field, with helical symmetry. The third area which Spitzer helped to shape is that of stellar dynamics. The idea of 'relaxation' had been defined by Chandrasekhar but it was the work of Spitzer which clarified how [ 3 ] As with the other areas, he wrote up his contributions as a book, Dynamical evolution of globular clusters In he received the National Medal of Science, then in the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for [ 2 ] :- Fundamental pioneering studies of practically every aspect of the interstellar medium, culminating in the results obtained using the Copernicus satellite.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in