Olin J. Eggen

Biography

Olin Jeuck Eggen was born in Orfordville, Wisconsin, to Olin Eggen and Bertha Clare Jeuck, both of Norwegian descent. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940, served in the OSS during World War II, and returned to the same university for his Ph.D. in astrophysics, which he completed in 1948. Recognized as a top observational astronomer of his era, Eggen is most famous for a 1962 paper co-authored with Donald Lynden-Bell and Allan Sandage that first proposed the Milky Way formed from the collapse of a gas cloud. He also advanced the concept of moving groups of stars and suggested they might come from dissolved open clusters. For the 1965 volume Galactic Structure, edited by Blaauw and Schmidt, he contributed a key chapter on the subject. His career included positions at Lick Observatory, the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Caltech and Mt. Wilson Observatory, Mount Stromlo Observatory and the Australian National University, and finally Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Among his honors were the American Astronomical Society's Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 1985, membership and a vice presidency of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Pawsey Memorial Lectureship from the Australian Institute of Physics, and the presidency of the Astronomical Society of Australia. After his death, it was discovered that Eggen had possessed historically significant files and documents missing for decades from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, including the so-called Neptune file. During his life, he consistently denied taking or holding those papers. The University of Wisconsin–Madison holds Eggen's personal papers and correspondence, which cover large-scale post-war astronomy and astrophysics, particularly the construction of four-meter optical telescopes in the southern hemisphere. These archives are kept at the university's Steenbock Library.