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Lawrence Hugh Aller (1913–2003)

Published onDec 01, 2003
Lawrence Hugh Aller (1913–2003)

The announcement still lies in my inbox: "Lawrence Aller died last Sunday." On 16 March 2003, one of the world's fine astronomers passed away at the age of 89, leaving behind a legacy that will ripple as long as there are students of the celestial science, one that incorporated observation, theory, education, care, decency, and kindness.

Lawrence was born in the humblest of conditions in Tacoma, Washington, on 24 September 1913. His mother, Lella (Belle) Allen, was a homemaker and his father Leslie Aller, was an occasional printer and gold prospector who thought that the use of the mind was a waste of time. With fierce persistence and dedication, Lawrence pulled off a feat that would probably not be possible now: getting into college without having finished high school, the result of being dragged to work in his father's primitive gold mining camp. His interest, sparked by leaflets from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and by Russell, Dugan, and Stewart's venerable textbook, led him to a correspondence, and finally a meeting, with Donald Menzel of Harvard, who persuaded the admissions director of the University of California at Berkeley to admit him in 1932.

From there, Lawrence went on to graduate school at Harvard and the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he studied with Menzel and developed his interest in stellar and nebular astronomy. After working in the War effort, he made his professorial debut at Indiana University, where he stayed until 1948 before leaving for the University of Michigan. Residing there for the next 14 years, he established his research reputation and helped develop the Michigan graduate program. In 1962, the opportunity arose to return to California, to UCLA, where he again was instrumental in founding a PhD program. There he stayed, through his retirement in 1984, doing research right up to the end. Eight other schools received him as visiting professor.

Lawrence knew that to make inroads into astronomy, he needed to apply physics to the observations, which he ardently sought. Little pleased him more than gathering photons, except perhaps for making atomic calculations with which he could analyze spectra. His real love was gaseous nebulae, specifically planetary nebulae (which he called his ``hobby"), the graceful shells of gas surrounding dying stars that are making their transitions to becoming white dwarfs. His range of simultaneous research projects was staggering. Having been an undergraduate student at Michigan in the late 1950s, I followed him to UCLA to work on my doctorate. When I arrived, I found him engaged in stellar spectroscopy, solar research, nebular theory, nebular observations (he tossed a box of plates at me and said in effect, ``here is your thesis"), and of all things Mie scattering theory to explain the zodiacal light!

A list of his discoveries and influences is impressive. A sample: Lawrence played a major role in Menzel's group, which produced the famed ``Physical Processes in Gaseous Nebulae," an 18-part series that ran in the Astrophysical Journal from 1937 to 1945 and that explained nebular spectra. He was among the first to promulgate what in the 1940s was utter heresy, that the chemical compositions of stars could differ from one another. He was the first to observe gradients in spiral galaxies, which ultimately turned out to be the result of abundance variations. David Bohm and Lawrence established the existence of Maxwellian velocity distributions in nebular plasmas. Leo Goldberg, Edith Müller, and he were instrumental in establishing the chemical composition of the Sun. His observations of planetaries were legion. Never content with current observational and analytical capabilities, he sought out the latest equipment, from image tubes through CCDs to the best computers, ever looking ahead. His work was honored in 1992, when he received the American Astronomical Society's Russell Prize.

Perhaps Lawrence's greatest legacy involved his teaching and writing. At Michigan, he taught a two-semester course in advanced general astronomy that covered nearly everything, in addition to a remarkable four-semester sequence in astrophysics (general, stellar atmospheres, nebular astrophysics, and stellar interiors). These were backed up by an extraordinary set of books. In 1943, Goldberg and he turned out the seminal tome, "Atoms, Stars, and Nebulae." (A solo third edition was published in 1991.) Then in 1953 arrived "The Atmospheres of the Sun and Stars" (revised a decade later), a tour de force on the physics of stellar plasmas and radiative transfer that became the bible of a generation of astronomers. "Nuclear Transformations, Stellar Interiors, and Nebulae" appeared a year later, and "Gaseous Nebulae" two years after that (rewritten in 1984 as "Physics of Thermal Gaseous Nebulae"). Not having a computer available in the early years, he used his students, creating mammoth "Aller Problems" that solved the equations for results that went into the books. Never formally published were two massive tomes of advanced general astronomy. To those of us lucky enough to have them, they serve as references to this day. His students, both undergraduate and graduate, are everywhere, their own students in turn carrying on Lawrence's ideas and work.

In 1941, Lawrence married Rosalind Duncan Hall (who survives), and together they raised three children: Hugh, Gwen, and Raymond. Not only did one son become an astronomer, but so has one granddaughter (a dynasty established). Lawrence was absorbed by news and politics. He hated injustice of any kind, and let you know about it. He could entertain for hours with stories of his youth and of other astronomers, never realizing that he would also be the source of affectionate stories that would be told and retold by his own students. Of beautiful heart, he was a good father, both to his own children and to those he adopted as his students, none of whom, having been taught by him, will ever forget.

Incredibly prolific, his vita lists over 500 publications, his first (in 1935) involving observations of the spectrum of Nova Herculis 1934, his last (in 2003!) the abundances of Hu1-2, fittingly one of his beloved planetary nebulae, one with a wonderfully deviant chemical composition.

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