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George Howard Herbig (born January 2, 1920) is an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.

He received his Ph.D in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley; his dissertation is entitled A Study of Variable Stars in Nebulosity. His specialty is stars at an early stage of evolution (a class of intermediate mass pre-main sequence stars are named Herbig Ae/Be stars after him) and the interstellar medium. He is perhaps best known for his discovery, with Guillermo Haro, of the Herbig-Haro objects; bright patches of nebulosity excited by bipolar outflow from a star being born. Herbig has also made prominent contributions to the field of diffuse interstellar band (DIB) research, especially through a series of nine articles published between 1963 and 1995 entitled "The diffuse interstellar bands."

Honors

Awards

• Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1955)
• Foreign Scientific Member, Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the AAS (1975)
• Médaille, Université de Liège (1969)
• Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1980)
• Petrie Prize and Lectureship of the Canadian Astronomical Society (1995)

Named after him

• Asteroid 11754 Herbig
• Herbig Ae/Be stars
• Herbig-Haro objects

Selected publications

• "High-Resolution Spectroscopy of FU Orionis Stars", ApJ 595 (2003) 384–411 [1]
• "The Young Cluster IC 5146", AJ 123 (2002) 304–327 [2]
• "Barnard's Merope Nebula Revisited: New Observational Results", AJ 121 (2001) 3138–3148 [3]
• "The Diffuse Interstellar Bands", Annu. Rev. Astrophys. 33 (1995) 19–73
• "The Unusual Pre-Main-Sequence star VY Tauri", ApJ 360 (1990) 639–649
• "The Structure and Spectrum of R Monocerotis", ApJ 152 (1968) 439
• "The Spectra of Two Nebulous Objects Near NGC 1999", ApJ 113 (1951) 697

External links

• Bruce Medal page