Rudolph Minkowski (born Rudolf Leo Bernhard Minkowski ;"Minkowski". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. ; May 28, 1895 – January 4, 1976) was a German-American astronomer.
Biography + Asteroids discovered: 1 1620 Geographos September 14, 1951 Minkowski was the son of Marie Johanna Siegel and physiologist Oskar Minkowski.Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present: I–MThe Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography His uncle was Hermann Minkowski, a mathematician and one of Einstein's teachers in Zürich. Rudolph studied supernovae and, together with Walter Baade, divided them into two classes (Type I and Type II) based on their spectral characteristics. He and Baade also found optical counterparts to various radio sources.
He headed the National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a photographic atlas of the entire northern sky (and south to declination -22°) down to an apparent magnitude of 22.
Together with Albert George Wilson, he co-discovered the near-Earth Apollo asteroid 1620 Geographos in 1951. He additionally discovered a correlation between the luminosity of early-type galaxies and their velocity dispersion,Minkowski, R. (1962), Internal Dispersion of Velocities in Other Galaxies which was later quantified by Faber and Jackson. He won the Bruce Medal in 1961. The lunar crater Minkowski is named after him and his uncle.
In the 1940s, he created a catalog of nearly 200 planetary nebulae, including Minkowski 2-9, and a dwarf galaxy near NGC 541, known as Minkowski's Object, is named after him.
List of discovered astronomical objects
NameDiscovery YearType Ref. 1620 Geographos 1951 Asteroid M1-42 1946 Planetary nebula M1-63 1946 Planetary nebula M1-91 1946 Planetary nebula M1-92 1946 Protoplanetary nebula M2-9 1947 Planetary nebula M2-42 1947 Planetary nebula M4-18 1959 Planetary nebula Bibliography
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External links Short Biography