Arthur Eddington

Also known as Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Sir Arthur Eddington

British astrophysicist (1882-1944)

AI overview

Arthur Eddington was a British astrophysicist who lived from 1882 to 1944 and made important contributions to understanding stars and physics. He is historically significant for his work on stellar structure and for helping to verify Einstein's theory of relativity through astronomical observations.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Given name: Arthur
Gender: male
Citizenship: United Kingdom
Place of birth: Kendal
Place of death: Cambridge
Occupation: mathematician
Position held: professor
Educated at: University of Cambridge
Employer: Royal Observatory
Languages spoken: English language
Notable work: radiative transfer
Noble title: Knight Bachelor
Doctoral advisor: Ernest Barnes
Field of work: astrophysics
Image: Arthur Stanley Eddington.jpg

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member of: Academy of Sciences of Turin
Commons category: Arthur Stanley Eddington
date of birth: 1882-12-28
date of death: 1944-11-22
Commons Creator page: Arthur Stanley Eddington
nominated for: Nobel Prize in Physics
name in native language: sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
writing language: English language
influenced by: Horace Lamb
maintained by WikiProject: WikiProject Mathematics

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Encyclopedic overview

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astrophysicist and mathematician. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.

Around 1920, he foreshadowed the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars in his paper "The Internal Constitution of the Stars". At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; Eddington was the first to correctly speculate that the source was fusion of hydrogen into helium.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Arthur Eddington” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.