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Donald Lynden-Bell

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Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> (5 April 1935 – 6 February 2018) was a British theoretical astrophysicist. He was the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres, and that such black holes power quasars.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref> Lynden-Bell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985–1987) and received numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. He worked at the University of Cambridge for his entire career, where he was the first director of its Institute of Astronomy.

BiographyEdit

Lynden-Bell was born at Dover Castle in Dover, Kent, into a military family,<ref name="times-obit"/> as one of two children to Lachlan Arthur Lynden-Bell (1897–1984) and Monica Rose Thring (1906–1994). His father, a lieutenant colonel, fought on the Western Front and in the Middle East during World War I and had received a Military Cross.<ref name='kavli'/> He had a sister, Jean Monica, who became a prominent music teacher in Canada.<ref name="times-obit">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

He attended Marlborough College before being admitted to Clare College, Cambridge in 1953.<ref name="araa">Template:Citation</ref> After earning a distinction in the Mathematical Tripos,<ref name="araa" /> Lynden-Bell went on to doctoral studies in theoretical astronomy working with Leon Mestel, which he completed in 1960.<ref>Template:Cite thesis</ref> In 1962, he published research with Olin Eggen and Allan Sandage<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> arguing that the Milky Way originated through the dynamic collapse of a single large gas cloud.<ref name="Eggen1962">Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1969 he published his theory that quasars are powered by massive black holes accreting material. From counting dead quasars, he deduced that most massive galaxies have black holes at their centres.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Lynden-Bell developed a theory for the relaxation of a system of particles in changing potential field known as "violent relaxation." Violent relaxation has many applications in dynamical astronomy, affecting the orbits of stars within star clusters and galaxies.<ref name="Lynden-Bell1967">Template:Cite journal</ref> Lynden-Bell is also known for the development of the theory of the gravothermal catastrophe, a phenomenon in star clusters that is the result of the negative heat capacity of gravitational systems. The catastrophe occurs when the core of a cluster shrinks and heats up, causing it to transfer energy to stars in the cluster's halo, leading the cluster core to collapse.<ref name="Lynden-Bell1968">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Lynden-Bell authored an influential 1974 paper with James E. Pringle about the evolution of disks around "nebular variables," which were later to become known as T Tauri stars – an early phase in a star's life cycle.<ref name=thewire>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The paper predicts the signature of radiation from such disks, which is emitted primarily at infrared wavelengths where it dominates over the emission from the star.<ref name="Lynden-Bell1974">Template:Cite journal</ref> Excess infrared emission from young stars has become one of the primary methods used to identify these objects in astronomical surveys.<ref name="Lada2003">Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 1971, he became Professor of Astrophysics (1909) and later the first director of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, when it formed from the merger of the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics and the Cambridge Observatories in 1972.<ref name="araa" />

In the 1980s, he was a member of a group of astronomers known as the 'Seven Samurai' (with Sandra Faber, David Burstein, Alan Dressler, Roger Davies, Roberto Terlevich, and Gary A. Wegner) who postulated the existence of the Great Attractor, a huge, diffuse region of material around 250 million light-years away that results in the observed motion of our local galaxies.<ref>Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, 1st. ed., p. 410, Harper Collins, 1991</ref>

Lynden-Bell, Roger Griffin, Neville Woolf, and Wallace L. W. Sargent were in the 2015 documentary film Star Men that covered some of their professional accomplishments at their fiftieth reunion to redo a memorable hike.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

His research in the last years of his life mainly focused on astrophysical jets and general relativity.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Personal life and deathEdit

Donald was married to Ruth Lynden-Bell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge, on 1 July 1961.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lynden-Bell died at his home in Cambridge on 6 February 2018, at the age of 82.<ref name="ioa" /> He had a stroke in the months preceding his death, and never fully recovered.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Responding to news of his death, John Zarnecki, then President of the Royal Astronomical Society, praised Lynden-Bell's contributions to astronomy, particularly his "incisive questions at scientific meetings and being generous in his support for others".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

HonoursEdit

AwardsEdit

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  • The first Kavli Prize for Astrophysics (2008), with Maarten Schmidt<ref name=":0" /><ref name='kavli'>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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Named after himEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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