Viktor Hambardzumyan
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Viktor Hambardzumyan (Armenian: Վիկտոր Համբարձումյան; September 18, 1908 [O.S. September 5] – August 12, 1996) was an Armenian astronomer and astrophysicist, who achieved his main results in Soviet times. One of the pioneers of theoretical astrophysics, he worked on the cosmogony of stars and galaxies, stellar dynamics, and gaseous nebulas. In 1947 he discovered stellar associations. He suggested that T Tauri stars are very young and that loose stellar associations are expanding. Outside Armenia, he is primarily known by the Russian version of his name, Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian (Russian: Виктор Амазаспович Амбарцумян).
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[edit] Life
Viktor Hambardzumyan was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. His surname is sometimes given as Ambarzumian or Ambarzumyan or Ambarzumjan, and his first name is sometimes given as Victor. His middle name is sometimes given as just Amazasp. Having graduated from the Leningrad University he studied with Belopolsky in Pulkovo Observatory from 1928 to 1931.
He worked at the Pulkovo Observatory; the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, which he founded in 1946 and directed; Yerevan State University; and the Armenian Academy of Sciences, where he served as president from 1947 until 1993. From 1953 Ambartsumian was an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Corresponding Member since 1939). He served as president of the International Astronomical Union during 1961–1964. He had four children: Ruben, Rafael, Karine, Heghine.
[edit] Works
While at Pulkovo he also taught at the University of Leningrad and wrote the first Russian textbook on theoretical astrophysics. Most of his research was devoted to invariance principles applied to the theory of radiative transfer, inverse problems of astrophysics, and the empirical approach to the problems of the origin and evolution of stars and galaxies.
He was the first to suggest that T Tauri stars are very young and to propose that nearby stellar associations are expanding. He also showed that evolutionary processes such as mass loss are occurring in galaxies; worked on interstellar matter, radio galaxies, and active galactic nuclei; and was the principal organizer of two major conferences on SETI at the Byurakan Observatory in 1964 and 1972.
[edit] Honors
Awards
Titles
Named after him
- Asteroid 1905 Ambartsumian
[edit] Bibliography
- V.A. Ambartsumian, Theoretical Astrophysics. Translated from the Russian ("Teoreticheskaya astrofizika", Moscow, 1952) by J.B. Sykes, New York: Pergamon Press, 1958
- V.A. Ambartsumian, A Life in Astrophysics : Selected Papers of Viktor Ambartsumian, edited by Rouben V. Ambartsumian, New York: Allerton Press, 1998, ISBN 0-89864-082-2
