Abstract
THE Bruce Gold Medal, founded in 1897, is unique among astronomical awards in that the responsibility for the nomination of candidates rests with the directors of the Harvard, Lick and Yerkes Observatories in, and the Greenwich and Cordoba Observatories outside, the United States. The consequence has been that the directors of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, who are the trustees of the Bruce Medal Fund, have always had before them the names of the outstanding astronomers of the time, and so wise has their final choice always been that the Medal is generally recognized as the highest award for astronomical achievement. It is only fitting that the name of Edward Arthur Milne should be added to those of the great mathematical astronomers—Newcomb, Hill, Poincaré, E. W. Brown, Eddington, de Sitter and Charlier—who have achieved this distinction. Milne's contributions have covered a wide field in astrophysics and cosmogony. His studies of radiative equilibrium in stellar atmospheres greatly extended and deepened the classical results of Schwarzschild in this field, while the collaboration of Milne and Fowler in the application of ionization theory led to the generally accepted scale of temperatures and pressures in the stellar sequence. By-products of these two main lines of investigation were a theory of the equilibrium of the solar chromosphere as a result of monochromatic radiation pressure, and the concept of 'run-away atoms' as the carriers of those disturbances in the sun which lead to terrestrial magnetic storms and radio fade-outs.
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Award of Bruce Medal to Prof. E. A. Milne. Nature 155, 783 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155783a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155783a0