Oort, Jan

Jan Oort, in full Jan Hendrik Oort, (born April 28, 1900, Franeker, Netherlands—died November 5, 1992, Leiden), Dutch astronomer who was one of the most important figures in 20th-century efforts to understand the nature of the Milky Way Galaxy.

After studies at the University of Groningen, Oort was appointed astronomer to the Leiden Observatory in 1924. In 1935 he was appointed professor at the University of Leiden and vice-director of the observatory. During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, Oort left the observatory and the university in protest of the expulsion of Jewish professors in 1942 and spent the remainder of the war in the countryside. After the war ended in 1945, he returned to the university and became director of the observatory, a position he held until 1970.

In 1925 Bertil Lindblad of Sweden had advanced the theory that the Milky Way rotates in its own plane around the centre of the galaxy. Oort was able to confirm this theory in 1927 through his own direct observations of star velocities in the galaxy, and he modified the theory substantially into the form used thereafter.

Oort’s subsequent work, as well as that of the school of astronomy he developed in the Netherlands, was directed toward strengthening and testing the Lindblad-Oort theory. In the early 1950s Oort used radio astronomy to determine that the Sun is about 30,000 light-years from the centre of the galaxy and takes 225 million years to complete an orbit around it. The discovery in 1951 of the 21-cm radio waves generated by hydrogen in interstellar space provided him with a new method for mapping the spiral structure of the galaxy.

In 1950 Oort proposed that comets with very long periods originate from a vast cloud of small bodies that orbit the Sun at a distance of about one light-year, and the approach of other stars toward this cloud alters some comets’ orbits so that they pass close to the Sun. The existence of this region, which was named the Oort Cloud, eventually came to be accepted by most astronomers.

From 1958 to 1961 Oort was president of the International Astronomical Union, of which he had been general secretary from 1935 to 1948.