Biographical Memoirs Volume 86 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Lawrence Hugh Aller
Lawrence Hugh Aller
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~Bio,graphicat Memoirs VOLUME 86
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A substantial * action of Aller's research work was devoted to the determination of the chemical composition of stars of different types and of planetary nebulae, which are objects in transition between red giant stars and white dwarfs.
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In 1929, at the end of his second year in high school, Aller was taken away by his father to a mining camp in northern California, close to the border with Oregon, not far from a little village called Takilma, where he stayed for two and one-half years, never finishing the high school cycle. With the support of his brother Paul he abandoned the mining camp and went to Oakland to live with his sister Jane and her husband.
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He did not go to graduate school immediately because of illness, and in May 1937 he went up to Lick Observatory as a summer assistant assigned to work with Nick Mayall measuring radial velocities of globular star clusters and galaxies using the Crossley telescope. Aller decided to go to Harvard for his graduate education because he wanted to work with Menzel.
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They worked on the rotation curve of the M33 galaxy, and Aller obtained the necessary plates on planetary nebulae for his Ph.D. thesis.
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The title of his doctoral thesis was "A Spectroscopic Analysis of the Planetary Nebulae." THE ACADEMIC JOURNEY From 1943 to 1945 Aller participated in the war effort at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, where he was hired as a physicist to work on the electromagnetic separation of the 235 and 238 uranium isotopes. The director of the laboratory was Ernest O
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In 1956 he published Gaseous Nebulae, and in 1961 he published the last of the Michigan books, The Abundance of the Elements. The lack of adequate observing facilities at Indiana and afterward at Michigan led Aller to participate actively as a guest investigator at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the 1945-1982 period.
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The 1960 paper with Goldberg and Edith Muller and the 1976 paper with John Ross were standard references for solar chemical composition from the 1960s to the 1980s. Aller spent three sabbatical years in Australia as a visiting professor: in 1960-1961 at the Australian National Observatory, in 1968-1969 at Sydney University and the University of Tasmania, and in 1977-1978 at the University of Queensland.
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He was named professor emeritus in 1984, but this distinction did not imply the end of his academic career. He published his book Physics of Thermal Gaseous Nebulae in 1984, continued to teach into the mid-199Os, and kept doing research until the end of his life.
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During the fourth meeting, which took place at University College London in 1982, I had the pleasure to give on behalf of the scientific organizing committee two academic medals, one to Michael Seaton and the other to Lawrence Aller, for their lifelong contributions to the study of planetary nebulae. The proceedings of the eighth symposium on planetary nebulae, which was sponsored by the international Astronomical Union, were dedicated to Aller's memory.3 Aller kept his initial love for planetary nebulae during his entire life.
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Selected Papers on Physical Processes in Ionized plasmas N ew York: Dover, 1962.
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Physical processes in gaseous nebulae.
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The spectra of thirty-three gaseous nebulae in the yellow-green region obtained with an electronic camera. Astrophys.
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Origin of planetary nebulae: Morphology, carbonto-oxygen abundance ratios, and central star multiplicity. Astrophys.
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