Elizabeth Cornwall Tilley

This article is about Elizabeth Cornwall Tilley. For the star she studied, see 59 Serpentis.

Elizabeth Roberts Cornwall Tilley (née Elizabeth Roberts Cornwall; 1914–1996)[1] was an American astronomer known for her spectrographic study of the multiple star system 59 Serpentis.[2] She earned her Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1943.[1] Her doctoral thesis, "A Spectrographic Study of the Triple System in 59 d Serpentis," was supervised by astronomer Dean Benjamin McLaughlin and became a foundational work in understanding this complex stellar system [2][1] and continues to be cited in astronomical research.

Education and Personal Life

Elizabeth Roberts Cornwall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1914 to Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Cornwall.[3] She attended Vassar College, graduating in 1935, where she was elected to the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa.[3] She then pursued graduate studies, earning a Master of Arts degree from Wellesley College in 1939.[3]

In March 1942, while she was a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at the University of Michigan, her engagement to Thomas Clark Tilley was announced.[3] Thomas Tilley, a graduate of Yale University, was studying at the University of Michigan Law School at the time.[3]

Doctoral Research on 59 d Serpentis

Tilley's doctoral research focused on 59 d Serpentis, a star that appears single to the naked eye but is a quadruple star system.[4] The system's primary component is itself a spectroscopic triple system, a rare configuration that made it a subject of significant interest.[2][4]

This primary component consists of a cooler, large G-type giant star and a close binary pair of hot, white A-type main-sequence stars.[2][4] Tilley's investigation was the first to determine the detailed orbital elements for this triple system.[5] Her research built upon the 1938 independent discovery by her advisor, Dean B. McLaughlin, and French astronomer R. Tremblot, who first identified three distinct spectra, confirming the system's triple nature.[2][4]

To conduct her analysis, Tilley utilized spectrograms taken at several major observatories between 1938 and 1942, including the University of Michigan Observatory, Mount Wilson Observatory, and Yerkes Observatory.[2] Her 1943 paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal, detailed her findings:[2]

  • The G-type giant and the A-type binary pair orbit their common center of mass every 386 days.[2]
  • The two A-type "white twins" orbit each other every 1.85 days.[2][4]
  • The paper provided detailed calculations for the orbits, masses, radii, and inclinations of the stars in the system, concluding that eclipses were unlikely.[2]

Tilley's findings were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 1943 and were reported on in The New York Times.[5] The report highlighted that 59 d Serpentis was one of only a few known cases where three spectra were visible from a star system and the only one at the time for which the system's details had been fully determined.[4]

Later Career and Legacy

Elizabeth Cornwall Tilley received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1943.[1] Her 1943 publication, "A Spectrographic Study of the Triple System in 59 d Serpentis," remains a key reference for the 59 Serpentis system.[2]

According to a 1954 National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel compiled by the American Institute of Physics, Tilley reported her professional status as "retired" by November 1954.[6]

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Elizabeth Roberts Cornwall Tilley (1914-1996)". AstroGen - The Astronomy Genealogy Project. American Astronomical Society. Retrieved 2025-09-26.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Tilley, Elizabeth Cornwall (1943). "A Spectrographic Study of the Triple System in 59 D Serpentis". The Astrophysical Journal. 98: 347. Bibcode:1943ApJ....98..347T. doi:10.1086/144577.
  3. ^ a b c d e "TROTH ANNOUNCED OF MISS CORNWALL". The New York Times. March 22, 1942. Retrieved 2025-09-26.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Federer Jr., Charles A. (1943). "The Complexity of Multiple Star Systems". Sky and Telescope. 2: 16–17.
  5. ^ a b Federer Jr., Charles A. (May 30, 1943). "ABOUT-FACE SHOWN IN BIG STAR'S ORBIT". The New York Times. Retrieved 2025-09-26.
  6. ^ "Display Full Records - 1954 National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel, 1954 - 1954 (American Institute of Physics)". Access to Archival Databases (AAD). U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved 2025-09-26.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.