George Herbig

George Howard Herbig (January 2, 1920 – October 12, 2013) was an American astronomer at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy. He is perhaps best known for his contribution to the discovery of Herbig–Haro objects.

Background

Born in 1920 in Wheeling, West Virginia, Herbig received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley; his dissertation is titled A Study of Variable Stars in Nebulosity.

Career

His specialty was stars at an early stage of evolution (a class of intermediate mass pre–main sequence stars are named Herbig Ae/Be stars after him) and the interstellar medium. He was perhaps best known for his discovery, with Guillermo Haro, of the Herbig–Haro objects; bright patches of nebulosity excited by bipolar outflow from a star being born.

Herbig also made prominent contributions to the field of diffuse interstellar band (DIB) research, especially through a series of nine articles published between 1963 and 1995 entitled "The diffuse interstellar bands."

Honors

Awards

• Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1955)
• Foreign Scientific Member, Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the AAS (1975)
• Médaille, Université de Liège (1969)
• Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1980)
• Petrie Prize and Lectureship of the Canadian Astronomical Society (1995)

Named after him

• Asteroid 11754 Herbig
• Herbig Ae/Be stars
• Herbig–Haro objects

Selected publications

• "High-Resolution Spectroscopy of FU Orionis Stars", ApJ 595 (2003) 384–411
• "The Young Cluster IC 5146", AJ 123 (2002) 304–327
• "Barnard's Merope Nebula Revisited: New Observational Results", AJ 121 (2001) 3138–3148
• "The Diffuse Interstellar Bands", Annu. Rev. Astrophys. 33 (1995) 19–73
• "The Unusual Pre-Main-Sequence star VY Tauri", ApJ 360 (1990) 639–649
• "The Structure and Spectrum of R Monocerotis", ApJ 152 (1968) 439
• "The Spectra of Two Nebulous Objects Near NGC 1999", ApJ 113 (1951) 697

References

Further reading

• Reipurth, Bo. GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution. Institute for Astronomy, University of HawaiÊ»i, Special Publications No. 1.