Struve, << STROO veh, >> Otto (1897-1963), was a Russian-born American astronomer who contributed much to the study of stars. He is known chiefly for his investigations of the spectra of stars. Struve did a great deal of research on spectroscopic binaries, pairs of stars identified by analyzing the spectrum of their light. Struve determined the sizes and masses of such stars by studying the cyclical shift of their spectral lines from blue to red wavelengths and back to blue. See Star (Binary stars) .
Struve was born on Aug. 12, 1897, in Kharkov (also spelled Kharkiv), in what is now Ukraine. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1923 and became a United States citizen in 1927. He was appointed the director of the Yerkes Observatory in 1932, and helped found the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas in 1939. Struve served as the first director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1959 to 1963. He died on April 6, 1963.
