Angular Diameter

History

Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927), a Swedish scientist, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903 “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation.” Among other achievements, Arrhenius is famous for the Arrhenius equation, which gives the dependence of the rate constant k of a chemical reaction on the temperature T (in K) and the activation energy of the reaction. For astrobiologists, Arrhenius is famous for his thoughts that microscopic forms of life, for example, spores, can be propagated in space, driven by the radiation pressure from the Sun and thereby seeding life from one planet to another or even between planets of different stellar systems. Arrhenius based his considerations on the fact that the space between the planets of our Solar System is teeming with micron-sized cosmic dust particles, which at a critical size below 1.5 μm would be blown away from the Sun with high...