Astronomer Biography

Henry Norris Russell

Danielle McCoy
Mr. Percival
Astronomy Honors
27 Feb. 2008

Henry N. Russell
For many years, Henry N. Russell was the leading theoretical astronomer in America. He began his life in Oyster Bay, New York on October 25, 1877. He was the first of three sons born to Alexander Gatherer Russell, a liberal Presbyterian minister, and Eliza Hoxie Norris, a mathematically skilled mother. He began at Princeton Preparatory School in 1890 and Princeton University in 1893, from which he graduated in 1897 insigni cum laude. He mainly studied mathematics, but his professor, Charles A. Young, had a great astronomical influence on Henry. He spent a year at the University of Cambridge, in Cambridgeshire, England, as a special student, where he attended the lectures of George Darwin. He studied for two years at the Cambridge University Observatory, where he developed one of the first photographic parallax programs for determining distances to stars.

Henry later returned to Princeton in 1905 as an instructor. He spent most of his professional life at Princeton, quickly rising to professorship in 1911 and becoming director of the observatory in 1912. Henry was convinced that the future of astronomical practice did not lay in open-ended data gathering programs, but rather in problem-oriented research in which theory and observation worked together. He was free to search for any new and exciting problems and to apply his mathematical talents to find their solutions. Up until 1920, Henry’s interests ranged widely from planetary and stellar astronomy to astrophysics. He developed means for the analysis of the orbits of binary stars, and developed methods for calculating the masses and dimensions of eclipsing variable stars. He also developed statistical methods for estimating the distances, motions, and masses of groups of binary stars. Henry worked with observational astronomers to analyze their hard found data, and he frequently showcased this information.

In studying stellar parallax at Cambridge, Henry applied his study of binary stars to what they could show about the lives and evolutions of stars and stellar systems. He used his parallax measurements to determine the absolute brightness of stars. When he compared their brightness to their colors, he determined that the majority of the stars in the sky (dwarfs), blue stars are brighter than yellow stars and yellows brighter than reds, but a few stars (giants) did not follow the same relationship, the yellows and reds were exceptionally brighter. When he later plotted this data, plotting brightness and spectra in a diagram, he showed the relationship between a star’s true brightness and its spectrum. He announced his results in 1913, and discovered that a Danish astronomer, Ejnar Hertzsprung had made the same discoveries. Within a year, the diagram was published and came to be known as the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram (HR Diagram).

Henry was a Christian liberal thinker; a family man, he married in 1908 and had four children with his wife. Being America’s leading astronomer, he was also president of the American Astronomical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. He received awards like, the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, two medals of the French Academy, five medals of American scientific societies, and many honorary degrees. Mexico even bestowed on him the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and issued a postage stamp in his honor. He remained director of the Princeton Observatory until 1947, when one of his students succeeded him. He later died on February 18, 1957 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Works Cited
Evans, Jc. "Henry Norris Russell." Physics & Astro Dept. , George Mason U. 25 Feb. 2008 .
Tenn, Joseph. "Henry Norris Russell." The Bruce Medalists. 25 Feb. 2008 .