John Carroll (astronomer)

Sir John Anthony Carroll KBE FRSE FRAS (8 January 1899 – 2 May 1974) was a British astronomer and physicist. In the 1920s he worked at the Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge, UK with F.J.M. Stratton and Richard van der Riet Woolley. He made major technological advances, inventing a high resolution spectrometer, and (with C G Fraser) a coronal camera.

He was born near Manchester and educated at King's School in Chester, before winning a scholarship to Cambridge University in 1917.

However, he decided to postpone Cambridge, and instead enlisted for service in the First World War, finding an interesting role in the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, to serve doing applied aeronautical science alongside George Paget Thomson.

Returning to Cambridge after the war he graduated MA and then continued as a postgraduate, receiving a PhD from Imperial College in 1924. He next travelled to California to work at the Mount Wilson Observatory with Robert Millikan for two years.

Aged only 30 he received the post of Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen University.

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