Leon Mestel (5 August 1927 – 15 September 2017) was a British-Australian astronomer and astrophysicist and emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex. His research interests were in the areas of star formation and structure, especially stellar magnetism and astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics. He was awarded both the Eddington Medal (1993) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (for Astronomy, 2002). Following his retirement, he wrote several obituaries and biographical articles on physicists and astrophysicists.
Early life and family
Leon Mestel was born on 5 August 1927 in Melbourne, Australia to Solomon Mestel, a rabbi and Rachel (née Brodetsky), a schoolteacher and sister of Selig Brodetsky.
Research career
Mestel's research interests were in the area of astrophysics, including: stellar structure, stellar evolution, star formation, cosmic magnetism and pulsar electrodynamics.
At the time he was completing his PhD, Mestel took a position as an ICI Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics in the University of Leeds, carrying out research there in the three-year period from 1951 to 1954.
Mestel left Cambridge in 1966 after being appointed to the position of professor at the University of Manchester, but before taking up his appointment there he spent the academic year of 1966–7 as JFK Fellow at the Weizmann Institute, Israel.
Mestel was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1977. He retired in 1992, becoming Emeritus Professor at Sussex.
Awards and honours
- 1993 – Eddington Medal for "his fundamental work on cosmic magnetism"
- 2002 – Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (for Astronomy, 2002).
Later years
After retiring, Mestel wrote several obituaries and biographical articles on physicists and astrophysicists for publications such as The Independent, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. Those for whom Mestel wrote obituaries and articles include Martin Schwarzschild, Roger John Tayler, William McCrea, Hermann Bondi, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Thomas George Cowling. Mestel also contributed the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Selig Brodetsky.
In 2002, Mestel was an invited speaker at a conference held in Cardiff, Wales, in memory of Fred Hoyle. In 2004, together with John D. Barrow, Mestel organised a Commemoration Meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society to mark 60 years since the death of Arthur Eddington, publishing a paper on Eddington later the same year. In 2009, Mestel featured in Portraits of Astronomers, a book by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies with portraits of thirty-eight leading UK astronomers. In 2008, he moved back to his family in Cambridge, where he died in September 2017.