Trumpler, Robert Julius (1886–1956)
Swiss-born American astronomer who studied and classified star clusters.
He also took part in observational tests of the general
theory of relativity in 1922. Trumpler was born in Zürich and studied
there and in Germany at Göttingen. In 1915 he moved to the United States;
he was professor of astronomy at the University of California from 1930.
At the Allegheny Observatory in Pennsylvania,
Trumpler noted that galactic star clusters contain an irregular distribution
of different classes of stars, and these observations paved the way for
later theories about stellar evolution. In 1930 he showed that interstellar
material was responsible for obscuring some light from galaxies, which had
led to overestimations of their distances from Earth. Working at the Lick
Observatory, near Chicago, he studied the planet Mars,
concluding that some of the supposed 'canals' observed by Italian astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli could be volcanic
faults. Trumpler's hypothesis, made in 1924, did not gain real support until
the return of the photographs taken by Mariner 9 probe, more than 50 years
later.
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