Peter van de Kamp

Piet Van de Kamp (December 26, 1901, Kampen – May 18, 1995), known as Peter van de Kamp in the United States, was a Dutch astronomer who lived most of his life in the United States. He specialized in astrometry, studying parallax and proper motions of stars. In the 1960s he announced that Barnard's star had a planetary companion based on observed "wobbles" in its motion, but this now seems likely to have been spurious.

Life

Van de Kamp studied at the University of Utrecht and started his professional career at the Astronomical Laboratory of Groningen working with Pieter Johannes van Rhijn. In 1923 he left for the Leander McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia for a year's residence supported by the Draper Fund of the National Academy of Sciences. There he assisted Samuel Alfred Mitchell with his extensive stellar parallax program and Harold Alden with the lengthy Boss star project.

The following year Van de Kamp went to the Lick Observatory in California as a Kellogg fellow. There he received his Ph.D. from the University of California in Astronomy in June 1925. Van de Kamp returned to McCormick on October 1, 1925 to take up the position left vacant by Harold Alden, who had just taken up the directorship of the Yale University Observatory Southern Station in Johannesburg, South Africa.

His work consisted of assisting with the parallax program and continuing the proper motion work that he and Alden had begun. Van de Kamp and Alexander N. Vyssotsky spent eight years measuring 18,000 proper motions. He did additional, smaller projects individually, including an investigation for general and selective absorption of light within the Galaxy.

Van de Kamp was also a very talented musician. He helped to organize an orchestra in Charlottesville, which he conducted and included fellow astronomer Vyssotsky. He also composed music, both for the orchestra and for the piano. His unpublished "Lullaby" can be found at the Music Library at the University of Virginia. At Swarthmore Van de Kamp performed with Peter Schickele, a.k.a. P. D. Q. Bach, and made several films of Schickele's student performance.

Barnard's Star

In the spring of 1937, van de Kamp left McCormick Observatory to take over as director of Swarthmore College's Sproul Observatory. He made observations of Barnard's Star and in the 1960s reported a periodic "wobble" in its motion, apparently due to a planetary companion. It was not until several decades had passed that a consensus had formed that this had been a spurious detection. [ [http://www.public.asu.edu/~sciref/exoplnt.htm George H. Bell: "The Search for the Extrasolar Planets: A Brief History of the Search, the Findings and the Future Implications"] ] [ [http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1635.html Astrobio.net: "The Barnard's Star Blunder"] ] [ [http://weblore.com/richard/barnard's_star.htm Weblore.com: "Barnard’s Star and the Detection of Extrasolar Planets"] ] . Astronomers George Gatewood and Heinrich Eichhorn using data obtained with the [http://www.pitt.edu/~aobsvtry/thaw.html Thaw Refractor] telescope of the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA) detected a change in the color-dependent image scale of the telescope used by Van de Kamp in his study; this apparently occurred after the objective lens was removed, cleaned, and replaced. Hundreds more stars showed "wobbles" like Barnard's when photographs before and after cleaning were compared - a virtual impossibility.

References

*cite journal|title= Peter van de Kamp and His "Lovely Barnard's Star|author=Schilling, G.|journal=Astronomy|volume= 13|pages= 26–28
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External links

* [http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/V/vanderKamp.html Biography]