Born Älfsby, Sweden, 14 July 1889
Died Lund, Sweden, 23 April 1958
Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark is best remembered for having been the first to propose Crab Nebula as the remnant of the 1054 guest star (supernova) on the basis of its location, quite close to that given in translated Chinese records. He also almost discovered what is now called Hubble's law. Lundmark was the son of Johann August Lundmark (1848–1896) and Lovisa Eriksdotter (1852–1939) and married Birgit Lundmark (1886–1974) with whom he is buried in the churchyard in Älfsby.
Lundmark began studies at the University of Uppsala in 1908, receiving a first degree in 1912 and a doctorate in 1920 for a thesis, carried out under Östen Bergstrand, on methods of distance measurement in astronomy, including the apparent diameters and apparent brightnesses of nebulae, individual very bright stars, and nova explosions, and calibrating these on known events in the Milky Way. He derived a distance to M31, the Andromeda Galaxy,...
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Selected References
Baryshev, Yu. and P. Teerikorpi (2002). Discovery of Cosmic Fractals. With a Foreword by Benoit Mandelbrot. Singapore: World Scientific Publications.
Berendzen, R., R. Hart, and D. Seeley (1976). Man Discovers the Galaxies. New York: Science History Publications.
Johnson, Martin (ed.) (1961). Knut Lundmark and Man's March into Space: A Memorial Volume (in Swedish and English). Göteborg: Värld och Vetande Förlag.
Lundmark, K. (1920). The Relations of the Globular Clusters and Spiral Nebulae to the Stellar System. Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar Vol. 60, no. 8. Stockholm. (Lundmark's thesis.)
——— (1921). “Suspected New Stars Recorded in Old Chronicles and among Recent Meridian Observations. ” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 33: 225–238.
——— (1924). “The Determination of the Curvature of Space‐Time in de Sitter's World.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 84: 747–770.
——— (1926). “A Preliminary Classification of Nebulae. ” Arkiv för matematik, astronomi och fysik B 19, no. 8.
——— (1946). “The Distance Indicators of Astronomy. ” Meddelande från Lunds astronomiska observatorium, ser. 1, no. 163.
Smith, Robert W. (1982). The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's ‘Great Debate', 1900–1931. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sundman, A. (1988). Den befriade himlen. Stockholm: Carlssons. (A biography of Lundmark in Swedish.)
Teerikorpi, Pekka (1989). “Lundmark's Unpublished 1922 Nebula Classification. ” Journal for the History of Astronomy 20: 165–170.
Vaucouleurs, Gérard de (1983). “The Distance Scale of the Universe.” Sky & Telescope 66, no. 6: 511–516.
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Teerikorpi, P. (2007). Lundmark, Knut Emil. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_875
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