Adriaan van Maanen
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Adriaan van Maanen (March 31, 1884, Sneek – January 26, 1946, Pasadena) was a Dutch-American astronomer.
Van Maanen, born into a well-to-do family in Friesland, studied astronomy at the University of Utrecht and worked briefly at the University of Groningen. In 1911, he came to the United States to work as a volunteer in an unpaid capacity at Yerkes Observatory. Within a year he got a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he remained active until his death in 1946.
He discovered Van Maanen's star.
He is well known for his measurements of the rotational speed of spiral nebulae. Being of the belief that nebulae were local, gaseous occurrences that existed in our galaxy, his measurements came to be at odds with Edwin Hubble's discovery that the Andromeda Nebula was a distant stellar object. The speed at which he calculated the nebula to move would have had the Cepheid stars that Hubble had used to calculate the distance rotating at a speed faster than that of light. By 1935 however, it had been determined that Van Maanen's measurements were incorrect.
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