Jan Oort

The Oort cloud, the Oort constants, and the asteroid 1691 Oort were all named after him.

The reference is to Henricus Oort (1836–1927), who was the grandson of a famous Rotterdam preacher and, through his mother, Dina Maria Blom, the grandson of theologian Abraham Hermanus Blom, a "pioneer of modern biblical research".

Several of Oort's uncles were pastors, as was his maternal grandfather.

"My mother kept up her interests in that, at least in the early years of her marriage", he recalled.

"But my father was less interested in Church matters."

Jan Hendrik Oort ( or ; 28 April 1900 – 5 November 1992) was a Dutch astronomer who made significant contributions to the understanding of the Milky Way and who was a pioneer in the field of radio astronomy.

The New York Times called him "one of the century's foremost explorers of the universe"; the European Space Agency website describes him as "one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century" and states that he "revolutionised astronomy through his ground-breaking discoveries."

Oort was born in Franeker, a small town in the Dutch province of Friesland, on April 28, 1900.

In 1903 Oort's parents moved to Oegstgeest, near Leiden, where his father took charge of the Endegeest Psychiatric Clinic.

Oort's father, "was a medical director in a sanitorium for nervous illnesses. We lived in the director's house of the sanitorium, in a small forest which was very nice for the children, of course, to grow up in."

Oort's younger brother, John, became a professor of plant diseases at the University of Wageningen.

In addition to John, Oort had two younger sisters and an elder brother who died of diabetes when he was a student.

Oort attended primary school in Oegstgeest and secondary school in Leiden, and in 1917 went to Groningen University to study physics.

He later said that he had become interested in science and astronomy during his high-school years, and conjectured that his interest was stimulated by reading Jules Verne.

His one hesitation about studying pure science was the concern that it "might alienate one a bit from people in general", as a result of which "one might not develop the human factor sufficiently."

But he overcame this concern and ended up discovering that his later academic positions, which involved considerable administrative responsibilities, afforded a good deal of opportunity for social contact.

Oort chose Groningen partly because a well known astronomer, Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, was teaching there, although Oort was unsure whether he wanted to specialize in physics or astronomy.

After studying with Kapteyn, Oort decided on astronomy.

"It was the personality of Professor Kapteyn which decided me entirely", he later recalled.

"He was quite an inspiring teacher and especially his elementary astronomy lectures were fascinating."

Oort began working on research with Kapteyn early in his third year.

According to Oort one professor at Groningen who had considerable influence on his education was physicist Frits Zernike.

After taking his final exam in 1921, Oort was appointed assistant at Groningen, but in September 1922, he went to the United States to do graduate work at Yale and to serve as an assistant to Frank Schlesinger of the Yale Observatory.

At Yale, Oort was responsible for making observations with the Observatory's zenith telescope.

"I worked on the problem of latitude variation", he later recalled, "which is quite far away from the subjects I had so far been studying."

He later considered his experience at Yale useful as he became interested in "problems of fundamental astronomy that [he] felt was capitalized on later, and which certainly influenced [his] future lectures in Leiden."

Personally, he "felt somewhat lonesome in Yale", but also said that "some of my very best friends were made in these years in New Haven."

In 1924, Oort returned to the Netherlands to work at Leiden University, where he served as a research assistant, becoming Conservator in 1926, Lecturer in 1930, and Professor Extraordinary in 1935.

In 1926, he received his doctorate from Groningen with a thesis on the properties of high-velocity stars.

The next year, Swedish astronomer Bertil Lindblad proposed that the rate of rotation of stars in the outer part of the galaxy decreased with distance from the galactic core, and Oort, who later said that he believed it was his colleague Willem de Sitter who had first drawn his attention to Lindblad's work, realized that Lindblad was correct and that the truth of his proposition could be demonstrated observationally.

Oort provided two formulae that described galactic rotation; the two constants that figured in these formulae are now known as "Oort's constants".

Oort "argued that just as the outer planets appear to us to be overtaken and passed by the less distant ones in the solar system, so too with the stars if the Galaxy really rotated", according to the Oxford Dictionary of Scientists.

He also postulated the existence of the mysterious invisible dark matter in 1932, which is believed to make up roughly 84.5% of the total mass in the Universe and whose gravitational pull causes "the clustering of stars into galaxies and galaxies into connecting strings of galaxies".

He discovered the galactic halo, a group of stars orbiting the Milky Way but outside the main disk.

Additionally Oort is responsible for a number of important insights about comets, including the realization that their orbits "implied there was a lot more solar system than the region occupied by the planets."

He was the second son of Abraham Hermanus Oort, a physician, who died on May 12, 1941, and Ruth Hannah Faber, who was the daughter of Jan Faber and Henrietta Sophia Susanna Schaaii, and who died on November 20, 1957.

Both of his parents came from families of clergymen, with his paternal grandfather, a Protestant clergyman with liberal ideas, who "was one of the founders of the more liberal Church in Holland" and who "was one of the three people who made a new translation of the Bible into Dutch."

In 1955, Oort's name appeared in Life magazine's list of the 100 most famous living people.

He has been described as "putting the Netherlands in the forefront of postwar astronomy."

Oort determined that the Milky Way rotates and overturned the idea that the Sun was at its center.