Eddington, Sir Arthur

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Eddington, Sir Arthur

1882-1944

Arthur Eddington was born on December 28, 1882 in Kendal, England. He attended Owens College where he studied physics and mathematics until he graduated in 1902. From 1906 to 1913, he was the primary assistant at the Greenwich Royal Observatory. In 1913, he accepted a position as a professor of astronomy at Cambridge. While at Cambridge, between 1914 and 1918, his main area of study became that of relativity. He was knighted in 1930 as a result of his work. He spent a great deal of his remaining years critiquing the work of his colleagues in astrophysics.

Eddington made significant contributions and published several books that helped expand the areas of general relativity and astrophysics. He studied the properties of a solar eclipse on various expeditions around the world. This research eventually confirmed Albert Einstein's theory that as light passes a very massive star, its path is bent due to gravity. Eddington spent a great amount of time researching the internal makeup of stars. One of his findings in this field was that the scattering of electrons is the primary source of the opacity of stars. Along with this finding, he also determined that a star's luminosity if finite for a supplied mass. The divisor of the inequality for finding a star's maximum luminosity is now called the Eddington Limit. These findings were published in 1926 in his book "The Internal Constitution of Stars." Both he and Albert Einstein created arguments against the existence of black holes, which were subsequently disproved in the 1950s. Sir Arthur Eddington died on November 22, 1944 in Cambridge, England.

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