Willem Jacob Luyten

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Willem Jacob Luyten (Mar 7, 1899, Semarang – Nov 21, 1994, Minneapolis) was a Dutch-American astronomer.

Luyten was born in the Dutch Indies where his father was a teacher French. At the age of 11 he observed Halley's comet, which started his fascination with astronomy. He also had a knack for languages, and eventually could speak nine. In 1912 his family moved back to the Netherlands where he went to study astronomy at the University of Amsterdam and was the first student to earn his PhD (at the age of 22) with Ejnar Hertzsprung at Leiden University. In 1921 he left for the United States where he first worked at the Lick and from 1925 at the Harvard College Observatory. He spent the years 1932-33 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where he met and married Willemina Miedema. Upon his return to the States he taught at the University of Minnesota where he remained the rest of his career.

Luytens studied the proper motions of stars and discovered many white dwarfs. He also discovered some of the Sun's nearest neighbors, including Luyten's star as well as the high–proper motion star system Luyten 726-8, which was soon found to contain the remarkable flare star UV Ceti.