Background
Rupert Wildt was born on June 25, 1905 in Munich, Germany, the son of Gero and Hertha Wildt.
Rupert Wildt was born on June 25, 1905 in Munich, Germany, the son of Gero and Hertha Wildt.
A combination of a love of astronomy, especially the planets, cultivated as a boy and a Ph. D. in chemistry, received in 1927 from the University of Berlin, led to his desire to found a new discipline, which he would call cosmochemistry. In 1936, Wildt entered the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.
Wildt worked as a research assistant at the observatory of Bonn University (1928 - 1929) and at the University of Göttingen (1930 - 1934). Wildt's first great discovery occurred at Göttingen. He theorized that certain absorption bands in the red spectra of Jupiter and the other outer planets, first observed by the astronomer Vesto Slipher, were due to the presence of methane and ammonia. Prior to Wildt's theory, astronomers had believed that Jupiter's spectrum was similar to the sun's. Wildt's theory was later confirmed by the Pioneer and Voyager space probes. Whereas hydrogen and helium make up most of the atmospheres of Jupiter and the outer planets, ammonia and methane were indeed found and are important minor components. Wildt's progress was interrupted by the rise of Hitler in Germany. Although not Jewish, Wildt was deeply involved with, and became engaged to, a young Jewish woman. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Wildt wrote to his mother that he was determined to leave Germany. Academic concerns may also have stimulated his desire to leave. The nazification of higher learning in Germany after 1933 did not elate academics. Professors were either forced to accept the inevitable, and thus keep their jobs, or emigrate, if they could, or die at the hands of the Nazis, which some did. Wildt had a difficult time when he decided to emigrate in 1934, for foreigners were more interested in helping Jews to escape. Finally, with the help of an American colleague, Henry Norris Russell, Wildt was named a Rockefeller fellow in 1935 at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California, which facilitated his departure. His Jewish fiancée, who had previously become the paramour of a high-ranking SS officer, did not leave with Wildt.
He eventually became a research associate, a post he kept until 1942 in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. At Princeton, Wildt continued his studies of the Jovian planets. In this area he was rather an innovator, for these planets provided few easy clues to their constitutions and origins; therefore, many astronomers neglected them. Wildt was an exception. In 1938 he hypothesized that the masses of Jupiter and Saturn were composed mainly of compressed hydrogen, which would cause them to have low densities. Thus the Jovian planets would be similar to the sun in their interior structures. The following year Wildt provided the answer to a puzzle that had confused astronomers for a long time. Solar gases are at least 5, 000 times more opaque than gases on earth, but until Wildt, nobody had discovered why. He showed that negative ions of hydrogen were absorbing the flow of radiation from the inside of the sun, thus causing the opacity. This theory, later verified through laboratory experimentation and reproduction, was expounded in Wildt's paper "Electron Affinity in Astrophysics, " published in Astrophysical Journal in March 1939. For these two theories Wildt received the Eddington Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of England in 1966. Wildt became an American citizen in 1942. Prior to his naturalization, while still at Princeton, the German government, uneasy about the "brain drain" of the 1930's, had sent Wildt's former fiancée to the United States to entice him back to Germany. Wildt rebuffed her, and she returned to Germany, where she later died in a concentration camp. During World War II, Wildt assisted in work organized under the Office of Scientific Research and Development, through the Office of Field Service and the National Defense Research Committee. He continued his government employment intermittently throughout his career, becoming, for example, a consultant to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In 1942, Wildt became associate professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, where he remained until 1946. In 1946, Wildt left the University of Virginia for a professorship at Yale University. He remained at Yale until he retired in 1973; from 1966 to 1968 he was chairman of the department of astronomy. His later career was devoted to the administration and direction of various astronomical societies. Wildt's particular interest was the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which operates two centers: Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Wildt was either president, chairman of the board, or director of AURA from 1958 to 1976. During his tenure at Yale he accepted visiting professorships at the University of Basel (1947), the University of California at Berkeley (1958), and the National University of Mexico (1963). Upon his retirement from Yale, Wildt moved to Orleans, Massachussets. He died of cancer and was buried there.
He claimed that the interiors of the outer planets consist of large, metallic, rocky cores encircled by ice and compressed hydrogen, above which are deep and dense layers of atmosphere. Data from the Pioneer and Voyager space flights have not confirmed this theory, however, hinting instead that the interiors have much smaller cores and contain hydrogen not just compressed but also in various forms.
He married Katherine Eldredge on October 26, 1962.