Trumpler, Robert Julius

▪ American astronomer

born Oct. 2, 1886, Zürich

died Sept. 10, 1956, Berkeley, Calif., U.S.

      Swiss-born U.S. astronomer who, in his extensive studies of galactic star clusters (star cluster), demonstrated the presence throughout the galactic plane of a tenuous haze of interstellar material that absorbs light generally and decreases the apparent brightness of distant clusters. The presence of this obscuring haze explained why spiral nebulae are observed to be concentrated at the galactic poles.

      Trumpler was educated in Switzerland and Germany, went to the United States in 1915, and joined the staff of Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, Calif., three years later. In 1922 he went to Wallal, Australia, on a solar-eclipse expedition to test experimentally Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity by observing whether the Sun's gravitational field indeed would bend the light from nearby stars. His observations confirmed Einstein's theory. Trumpler transferred to the astronomy department of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938 and retired in 1951.

      Trumpler's independent observations of galactic star clusters and the differences in them, which indicate their age, helped to provide the foundation of the present theory of stellar evolution. Probably the most successful scheme of classification of galactic clusters by appearance is Trumpler's. He also devised a method of classification in terms of magnitude and spectral type.

      His papers include “Observations on the Deflection of Light in Passing Through the Sun's Gravitational Field,” with the American astronomer William Wallace Campbell (1923), “Spectral Types in Open Clusters” (1925), “Observations of Mars at the Opposition of 1924” (1927), and “Preliminary Results on the Distances, Dimensions, and Space Distribution of Open Star Clusters” (1930), all in Lick Observatory Bulletins, and “Observational Evidence of a Relativity Red Shift in Class O Stars” (1935), in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

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