Otto Struve — astronomer with roots in the Russian Empire
Otto Lyudvigovich Struve was born in Kharkov, then in the Russian Empire and now Kharkiv in Ukraine, on 12 August 1897, the eldest child of Ludwig Struve, professor of astronomy at Kharkov University, and Elizaveta Struve. He was the last of an astronomical dynasty of Baltic German origin: his great-grandfather, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, founded the Pulkovo Observatory near St Petersburg in 1839, and his grandfather Otto, his uncle Hermann and his father were all astronomers of note. He was the first of the Russian Struves to attend a Russian-language rather than a German-language school.
He entered Kharkov University in 1915, but his studies were interrupted by service in the Imperial Russian Army from 1916 to 1918 and, after the Revolution, in the White Army of General Denikin from 1919. He was evacuated with the remnants of Wrangel's army from the Crimea in November 1920 and spent months in Gallipoli and Constantinople. In the same years his father and his brother died. In December 1920 the Berlin astronomer Paul Guthnick wrote on his behalf to Edwin Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, who offered him a post in March 1921. Struve reached New York on 7 October 1921.
Starting as an assistant in stellar spectroscopy, he became the observatory's director in 1932, succeeding Frost, and in the same years organised the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, which he also directed. He made Yerkes one of the leading centres of astrophysics, studying binary and variable stars, stellar rotation and interstellar matter; with the McDonald spectrograph, faint emission from interstellar hydrogen in the Galaxy was first detected. In 1947 he became chairman of the astronomy department of the University of Chicago, and in 1950 moved to Berkeley as head of the department and director of the Leuschner Observatory.
As vice-president and then, from 1952 to 1955, president of the International Astronomical Union, he helped keep the union together during the early Cold War. In 1959 or 1960 he became the first director of the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, serving until 1962. He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1944, and an asteroid and a lunar crater bear his name.
He died in Berkeley on 6 April 1963, aged sixty-five.
"Evacuated with the White Army from the Crimea in November 1920; after months in Turkey, accepted a post at Yerkes Observatory and reached New York on 7 October 1921."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kharkov, Kharkov Governorate (now Kharkiv, Ukraine)
Born in Kharkov in 1897, the son of the astronomer Ludwig Struve and great-grandson of Wilhelm Struve, founder of Pulkovo Observatory, he studied at Kharkov University and served in the Imperial and then the White army before leaving Russia in 1920.
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Kharkov, Kharkov Governorate (now Kharkiv, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.