Daniel Kirkwood
Daniel Kirkwood | |
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Jefferson College Stanford University |
Daniel Kirkwood (September 27, 1814 – June 11, 1895) was an American astronomer.
Kirkwood was born in
Kirkwood's most significant contribution came from his study of asteroid orbits. When arranging the then-growing number of discovered asteroids by their distance from the Sun, he noted several gaps,[3] now named Kirkwood gaps in his honor, and associated these gaps with orbital resonances with the orbit of Jupiter. Further, Kirkwood also suggested a similar dynamic was responsible for Cassini Division in Saturn's rings, as the result of a resonance with one of Saturn's moons. In the same paper, he was the first to correctly posit that the material in meteor showers is cometary debris.
Kirkwood also identified a pattern relating the distances of the
In 1891, at age 77, he became a lecturer in astronomy at Stanford University. He died in Riverside, California, in 1895.
Altogether he wrote 129 publications, including three books. The asteroid 1951 AT was named 1578 Kirkwood in his honor and so was the lunar impact crater Kirkwood, as well as Indiana University's Kirkwood Observatory. He is buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kirkwood Avenue is named for him.
Kirkwood was a cousin of Iowa governor Samuel Jordan Kirkwood who became United States Secretary of the Interior under President James A. Garfield and President Chester A. Arthur.[4]
Further reading
- Frank K. Edmondson,"Daniel Kirkwood: Dean of American Astronomers," Mercury Magazine (publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific), vol. 29, no. 3 (2000), pp. 26–33.
- J. Donald Fernie 1999, "The American Kepler," The New Scientist vol. 87, no. 5, pg. 398.
References
- ISBN 978-0-387-31022-0. Retrieved August 22, 2012.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-04-14.
- ^ Kirkwood, Daniel (1866). "On the Theory of Meteors" in Proceedings of American Association for the Advancement of Science for 1866, pp.8-14.
- ^ Clark, Dan Elbert (1917). Samuel Jordan Kirkwood. Iowa City, Iowa: Iowa State Historical Society. p. 8.
External links
- Works by Daniel Kirkwood at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Daniel Kirkwood at Internet Archive
- Daniel Kirkwood at Find a Grave
- "Daniel Kirkwood papers, 1864-1895" finding aid for the collection at the Indiana University Archives, Bloomington
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