Historical Figures in Astronomy   by: Carmen Rush

Dr. Allie Vibert Douglas

Allie Vibert Douglas was born in 1894 in Montreal. She began her studies in mathematics and physics at McGill University, but with the outbreak of WWI, she went to London to work in the War Office as a statistician. In 1918, at the age of 23, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire for her work.

Having returned to Montreal in 1920, she continued her studies, earning a Bachelors degree and then Masters Degree in 1921. Then she went on to Cambridge, studying under Arthur Eddington, one of the leading astronomers of the day. She earned her PhD in astrophysics through McGill in 1925 and was the first person to receive it from a Quebec university, and one of the first women to accomplish this in North America.

Vibert Douglas remained at McGill for the next 14 years. Then in 1939 she moved to Queens University where she served as Dean of Women until 1958. She was Professor of Astronomy from 1946 until her retirement in 1964 and was instrumental in having women accepted into engineering and medicine. In 1967 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. In the same year, the National Council of Jewish Women named her as one of 10 Women of the Century. In 1988, the year of her death, asteroid 3269 was named Vibert Douglas in her honor. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain and a president of the RASC.

While in Kingston, she was an active member of the Kingston Centre RASC. There was interest in astronomy in the Kingston area long before the Centre was founded in 1961. The Kingston Observatory opened in 1855, the first in Ontario, and astronomy has been taught at Queens since 1863. In the early 1900’s Queen’s professors and others from the area had become members of the Society. Vibert Douglas was an active member dating back to her Montreal years and became National President in 1943-44. It was largely due to Vibert Douglas’ work that the Kingston Centre was formed in 1961, the 16th Centre of the Society. Their first meeting was in Ellis Hall on the campus of Queens. 20 students and faculty met with Vibert Douglas serving as chair. The annual fee back then was $5. It was decided that members would be invited to observe at the Kingston Observatory with both the large and smaller telescopes one evening a week with the guidance of a graduate student in astronomy. Vibert Douglas finished the meeting with an illustrated talk on telescopes and the universe they reveal

The next time you drive by Kingston, you might want to visit Queens University to see Dr. Douglas’ meteorite collection. It’s mounted in a display case in Stirling Hall near the big Foucault Pendulum. The five specimens were formerly used by Douglas as teaching tools. One is an iron meteorite believed to originate from the 50 000 year old impact that created Meteor Crater (the Barringer Crater) in Arizona. This was the first crater on Earth to be positively identified by Dr. Eugene Shoemaker as being caused by an impact from an extraterrestrial object. Two others are H4 chondrites from Plainview, Texas, where 900 stones were collected from a 26 km field in 1935, due to a fireball that was observed in 1903. Another H5 chondrite comes from a fall at Richardton, North Dakota in 1918. Its black fusion crust is still intact. And yet another is an iron meteorite that is silver in color, with a cut and etching to show its crystalline pattern that indicates slow cooling. It is thought to originate from the early stages of the formation of our solar system and comes from a 30 000 year old impact site in Australia.

Thanks to the efforts of Yvan Dutil, an astrophysicist working for Analytical and Advanced Solutions in Quebec City, Vibert Douglas now has a crater on Venus named after her. Dutil was doing research on the history of astronomy in Quebec and noted that Douglas had not yet been recognized. This was surprising because the International Astronomical Union had decided to use only female names for craters on Venus. Large craters are named after famous women, small craters less than 20 km in diameter are given feminine names and all other types of features are given names after mythological characters. By this time all large craters had already been named so Dr. Vibert Douglas’ name was given to a patera, that is an irregular crater or a complex one with scalloped edges, probably of tectonic origin. The Vibert Douglas patera is located at 11.6 South latitude 194.3 East longitude. It is almost circular and 45 km in diameter. It took six months for approval to receive provisional status, and the naming will become official at the 2003 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union.

My thanks go to Mike Earl for the lead on this very interesting story!
 

This page last modified: March 12, 2003