Jacobus Kapteyn

Jacobus Kapteyn
Jacobus Kapteyn. Painting by Jan Veth (1921).
Born
Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn

(1851-01-19)19 January 1851
Died18 June 1922(1922-06-18) (aged 71)
Alma materUniversity of Utrecht
Known fordiscovery of evidence for galactic rotation
AwardsBruce Medal 1913
Scientific career
FieldsAstronomy

Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (19 January 1851 – 18 June 1922) was a Dutch astronomer. He carried out extensive studies of the Milky Way. He found that the apparent movement of stars was not randomly distributed but had two preferential directions: the two star streams. This discovery was later reinterpreted as evidence for galactic rotation. Kapteyn also suggested that these stellar velocities could be used to find the amount of non-luminous matter in the galaxy, which his student, Jan Oort, measured in 1932, referring to it as "invisible matter".