Cornelis Johannes van Houten

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cornelis Johannes van Houten (1920 – August 24, 2002) was a Dutch astronomer, sometimes referred to as Kees van Houten.

Born in The Hague, he spent his entire career at Leiden University except for a brief period (1954–1956) as research assistant at Yerkes Observatory. He got his undergraduate degree in 1940, but World War II interrupted his studies and he did not get his Ph.D. until 1952.

He married fellow astronomer Ingrid Groeneveld (who became Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld) and together they became interested in asteroids. They had a son, Karel.

In a jointly-credited trio with Tom Gehrels and Ingrid, he was an extremely prolific discoverer of many thousands of asteroids. Gehrels did a sky survey using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory and shipped the plates to the van Houtens at Leiden Observatory, who analyzed them for new asteroids. The trio are jointly credited with several thousand discoveries.

From the statistical properties uncovered it became clear that asteroids fall into certain "families".

He also studied the radial velocities of close binary stars. He never retired, but remained active and published articles until his death, on asteroids and eclipsing binaries.