| George Herbig | |
| Birth Date: | 2 January 1920 |
| Birth Place: | Wheeling, West Virginia |
| Death Place: | Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii |
| Citizenship: | United States |
| Fields: | Star formation, interstellar medium |
| Workplaces: | University of Hawaiʻi |
| Alma Mater: | UCLA University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
| Known For: | Herbig–Haro objects Herbig Ae/Be stars |
| Awards: | Helen B. Warner Prize (1955) Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1975) Bruce Medal (1980) |
George Howard Herbig (January 2, 1920 – October 12, 2013) was an American astronomer at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy.[1] He is perhaps best known for his contribution to the discovery of Herbig–Haro objects.[2] [3]
Born in 1920 in Wheeling, West Virginia,[4] 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.
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."
Awards
Named after him