Horace W. Babcock

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Horace Welcome Babcock (September 13, 1912 – August 29, 2003) was an American astronomer. He was the son of Harold D. Babcock.

Babcock invented and built a number of astronomical instruments, and in 1953 was the first to propose the idea of adaptive optics.^[1][2] He specialized in spectroscopy and the study of magnetic fields of stars. He proposed the Babcock Model, a theory for the magnetism of sunspots.

During World War II, he was engaged in radiation work at MIT and Caltech. After the war he began a productive collaboration with his father. His undergraduate studies were at Caltech and his doctorate from University of California, Berkeley.^[3]

Babcock's 1938 doctoral thesis contained one of the earliest indications of dark matter. He reported measurements of the rotation curve for the Andromeda galaxy (M31) which suggested that the mass-to-luminosity ratio increases radially.^[4] He, however, attributed it to either absorption of light within the galaxy or modified dynamics in the outer portions of the spiral and not to any form of missing matter. It was not until the 1970s and the work of Rubin and Ford that Babcock's rotation curve of M31 was fully accepted as an indication of a mass or gravity problem in spiral galaxies.^[5]

He was director of the Palomar Observatory for Caltech from 1964 to 1978.

Awards

• Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1957)^[6]
• Eddington Medal (1958)
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1959)^[7]
• Bruce Medal (1969)^[8]
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1970)^[9]
• George Ellery Hale Prize of the American Astronomical Society Solar Physics Division (1992)

Named after him

• Asteroid 3167 Babcock (jointly with his father)
• Babcock crater on the Moon is named only for his father

Honors

• Elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences (1954)^[10]
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1959)^[11]
• Elected to the American Philosophical Society (1966)^[12]

• Bruce Medal page Archived 2020-09-20 at the Wayback Machine
• Awarding of Bruce Medal
• Awarding of RAS gold medal
• H.W. Babcock, "The Possibility of Compensating Astronomical Seeing", PASP 65 (1953) 229
• Oral History interview transcript with Horace Babcock on 9 June 1975, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives. Interview conducted by Spencer Weart.
• Oral History interview transcript with Horace Babcock on 25 July 1977, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives. Interview conducted by Spencer Weart.
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir

• PASP 116 (2004) 290 (not available online yet, see [1])
• Preston, George W. (2004). "Obituary: Horace Welcome Babcock (1912–2003)". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 116 (817): 290–294. Bibcode:2004PASP..116..290P. doi:10.1086/382664.