George van Biesbroeck

George Van Biesbroeck was an astronomer with a storied life and a storied career. A native of Belgium, Van Biesbroeck delayed his pursuits in astronomy, opting to become an engineer per the wishes of his anxious father, who believed astronomy would not be such a lucrative career. In his time away from supervising the construction of roads and bridges, Van BIesbroeck, the son, was a frequent volunteer observer at the Royal Observatory in Uccle, Belgium. His position gave him the opportunity to study at the Heidelberg and Potsdam observatories, each for one year, and meet prominent astronomers such as Max Wolf and Karl Schwarzschild. 

In 1914, the German army invaded Belgium and took over the Royal Observatory where Van Biesbroeck was working. Because the (volunteer) astronomer had picked up some German from his time at Heidelberg, the commanding officers ordered him to guide the troops through city. After this experience, and worried that his destiny might lead him to a concentration camp, Van Biesbroeck applied for a position at Yerkes Observatory and was fortunately accepted. He moved his family to the United States in 1915, remaining for the length of a double star research project and even visiting the Van Vleck Observatory in 1916!

When the project at Yerkes ended, the family shipped back to Belgium where the father was ordered to enlist in the army. As luck would have it, Van Biesbroeck’s partner at the Yerkes Observatory was retiring that year and the observatory director invited Van Biesbroeck back to replace the retiree permanently. After a perilous 17 day journey by sea across the Atlantic, and a commute from New York to Wisconsin, the family reached their new home with 9 cents left among them. 

Van Biesbroeck got to work in no time. In her obituary notice, Elizabeth Roemer notes that the astronomer had “an acuity of eye, enormous energy, and access to two of the most splendid telescopes in the world for the job.” He continued research on double stars, making observations and measurements for a virtually uninterrupted 60 years. He also photographed comets, minor planets, and planetary satellites with the goal of measuring their positions, as a result discovering 3 comets and 11 asteroids. Additionally, the astronomer became quite the solar eclipse chaser, definitively confirming Einstein’s Theory of Relativity after a journey to Sudan. A reporter for the American magazine Time wrote on the achievement in 1952, “Dr. George van Biesbroeck, Belgian-born and 72, was a happy astronomer this week. Stroking his white goatee and skipping cheerfully around his office in Wisconsin's Yerkes Observatory, he told how he had checked with elegant precision the basic scientific law of the universe: Einstein's relativity.” Throughout all his time at Yerkes, the Van Biesbroeck family opened their home up to boarders; graduate students, young instructors, research associates, and visiting astronomers all felt the “warmth of their reception” that was “a happy recollection to astronomers around the world” according to Roemer. There, Van Biesbroeck’s wife facilitated informal discussions on astronomy, being a double-star observer herself. 

When he had to retire from the Yerkes Observatory, Van Biesbroeck continued observing at McDonald Observatory--a post he had dreamed of and created in the Davis Mountains of southwestern Texas where there were consistently clear dark skies. His astronomy career was still far from over; a road trip to California led the family to pass through Tuscon, Arizona where Van Biesbroeck paid a visit to the famed astronomer Gerard Kuiper, another signatory of the Van Vleck Guestbook. The latter astronomer encouraged the former to start his career up again formally with a position at the University of Tuscon; naturally, Van Biesbroeck did just that. 

Van Biesbroeck continued working just as always (with a project of charting the orbit of Neptune’s second satellite, Neried, which Kuiper had discovered) and celebrating his birthdays with special observing nights. David Levy recounts one of these anniversary nights in his Sky and Telescope article “An Observer for All Seasons”: 

In 1970 Van B marked his 90th birthday by observing with Steward Observatory’s 90-inch telescope. The following night a misstep caused him to lose his balance and fall off the observing platform. He struck his head on the floor and lost consciousness. When [Tom] Gehrels visited him in the hospital, Van B seemed barely alive. Unsure what to say to the unconscious man, he gamely mentioned that he had just observed Comet Tago-Sato-Kosaka. Hearing those words, Van B opened his eyes, pointed a finger, and asked Gehrels if he had seen that the comet had split!

The tales of Van Broesbick’s strength and character are endless.

When he died at the age of 94, he was one of the oldest working astronomers in the world. As Levy noted, Van B (as his friends knew him) was quite the “Renaissance astronomer.”