American Astronomer
Adams was born in Antioch (now in Turkey)
in 1876. He was the son of missionaries working in Syria, who returned to
America in 1885. Adams graduated from Dartmouth College and obtained his AM
from the University of Chicago in 1900. He started his career as assistant to
George Hale in 1901 at Yerkes Observatory. He then moved to Mount Wilson
Observatory in 1904 along with Hale. He served there as assistant director
(1913-23) and then as director from 1923, until his retirement in 1946.
His early work was mainly concerned with
Solar spectroscopy, but he gradually turned to stellar spectroscopy. He showed
how it was possible to distinguish between a dwarf and a giant star merely from
their spectra. He is however better known for his work on the orbiting
companion of Sirius, named Sirius B.
In 1924, Adams succeeded in making the
difficult spectroscopic observations and did in fact detect the predicted red
shift, which confirmed his own account of Sirius B and provided strong evidence
for general relativity.
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