Frank Shu

Frank Hsia-San Shu (徐遐生; June 2, 1943 – April 22, 2023) was a Chinese-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and author. Known with his doctoral advisor and collaborator C. C. Lin for the density wave theory, he was elected in 1987 a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and in 1992 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received in 1977 the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy, in 1996 the Brouwer Award, in 2000 the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, and in 2009 both the Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the Bruce Medal.

Quotes

• The rich variety of stars live in our Galaxy mostly singly or in pairs ... Sometimes, however, hundreds or thousands of stars can be found in loose groups called open clusters. The Pleiades is a daily young open closer, and the reflection nebulosity which surrounds the famous "seven sisters" of this cluster attests to the fact that these stars must only recently have been born out of the surrounding gas and dust. The oldest stars in our Galaxy are found in tighter groups called globular clusters. Rich globular clusters may contain more than a million members.
  • The Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy. Series of books in astronomy (pbk, illustrated, reprint, revised ed.). University Science Books. 1982. p. 12. ISBN 9780935702057.  (584 pages; textbook)

• The Voyager spacecraft revealed the rings of Saturn to have an unexpected richness of structure. Many of the observed features have now been identified as collective effects arising from the self-gravity of the ring material. These effects include spiral density waves and spiral bending waves, the main topics of this review chapter. Both kinds of waves were first discussed in the astronomical literature in connection with the dynamics and structure of spiral galaxies, and our discussion contrasts the similarities and differences between the disks of galaxies and planetary rings. After developing the theory of free and forced waves of both types, we discuss how the observed waves can be used as diagnostics to obtain crucial parameters that characterize the physical state of the rings.
  • "Waves in planetary systems by Frank H. Shu". Planetary Systems: Planetary Rings. IAU Colloquium 75, Space Science Series, based on a conference held in Toulouse, France, September 1982. Tucson, Arizona. pp. 513–561.  (quote from p. 513; xii+784 pages; edited by Richard Greenberg and André Brahic, with the assistance of Mildred Shapley Matthews & 44 collaborating authors)

• Spiral galaxies have played a prominent role in astronomical thought since the discovery by Lord Rosse in 1845 of the spiral structure of the whirlpool “nebula” M51 ... Through the work of Kapteyn, Shapley, Curtis, and especially Hubble, by the late 1920s, it became known, and not just speculated, that such spirals were disk-like stellar systems coequal to our own Milky Way system. From the optical study of the kinematics of stars in the solar neighborhood, Bertil Lindblad (1927) and Jan Oort (1927) deduced that the flattening of the galactic disk is due to rotation, and that this rotation occurred differentially, with the stars near the galactic center taking less time to go once around the center than the material farther out.
  • (2016) . "Six decades of spiral density wave theory". Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 54 (1): 667-724. (quote from p. 667)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Frank Shu on Wikipedia