Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the first edition, 1986
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction to spectroscopy, spectroscopes and spectrographs
- 2 The analysis of sunlight: the earliest pioneers
- 3 The foundations of spectral analysis: from Fraunhofer to Kirchhoff
- 4 Early pioneers in stellar spectroscopy
- 5 Spectral classification at Harvard
- 6 The Doppler effect
- 7 The interpretation of stellar spectra and the birth of astrophysics
- 8 Spectral classification: From the Henry Draper Catalogue to the MK system and beyond
- 9 Spectroscopy of peculiar stars
- 10 Quantitative analysis of stellar spectra
- 11 Some miscellaneous topics in stellar spectroscopy: individual stars of note, stellar chromospheres, interstellar lines and ultraviolet spectroscopy from space
- Figure sources and acknowledgements
- Appendix A List of solar lines designated by letters by Fraunhofer and others
- Appendix B Vogel's first spectral classification scheme of 1874
- Index of names
- Index of star names
- Index of spectral lines
- Index of subjects
- References
7 - The interpretation of stellar spectra and the birth of astrophysics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the first edition, 1986
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction to spectroscopy, spectroscopes and spectrographs
- 2 The analysis of sunlight: the earliest pioneers
- 3 The foundations of spectral analysis: from Fraunhofer to Kirchhoff
- 4 Early pioneers in stellar spectroscopy
- 5 Spectral classification at Harvard
- 6 The Doppler effect
- 7 The interpretation of stellar spectra and the birth of astrophysics
- 8 Spectral classification: From the Henry Draper Catalogue to the MK system and beyond
- 9 Spectroscopy of peculiar stars
- 10 Quantitative analysis of stellar spectra
- 11 Some miscellaneous topics in stellar spectroscopy: individual stars of note, stellar chromospheres, interstellar lines and ultraviolet spectroscopy from space
- Figure sources and acknowledgements
- Appendix A List of solar lines designated by letters by Fraunhofer and others
- Appendix B Vogel's first spectral classification scheme of 1874
- Index of names
- Index of star names
- Index of spectral lines
- Index of subjects
- References
Summary
Some early theories of stellar evolution
At the end of the nineteenth century the two main branches of stellar spectroscopy were spectral classification and radial-velocity measurements. The latter department was still in its relative infancy, but classification, thanks mainly to the energy of Pickering at Harvard, was a major activity. Classification had become closely related to theories of stellar evolution and these two aspects could hardly be disentangled in, for example, the classification devised by Lockyer [1], which involved first rising and then falling temperatures of stars over their life cycles, and which had some theoretical support from the work of Jonathan Homer Lane (1819–80) and August Ritter on the gravitational collapse of gaseous spheres.
The classification schemes used by Antonia Maury and Annie Cannon were also implicitly evolutionary theories, but with the direction of evolution being from the ‘earlier’ to ‘later’ spectral types. Rival theories to Lockyer's were then proposed for stellar evolution in the early years of the nineteenth century, with the Harvard spectral types as their basis, notably by Sir Arthur Schuster (1851–1934) in Great Britain [2] and by George Ellery Hale (1868–1938) in the United States [3]. Schuster's scheme involved gravitational collapse and cooling of gaseous masses on the socalled Kelvin–Helmholtz timescale.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Analysis of StarlightTwo Centuries of Astronomical Spectroscopy, pp. 127 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
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