Radó von Kövesligethy

Radó von Kövesligethy (in Hungarian usage, Kövesligethy Radó) (Verona, Austria, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1 September 1862 – Budapest, Hungary 11 October 1934), was a Hungarian physicist, astronomer and geophysicist.

Radó Von Kövesligethy portrait

Kövesligethy developed a spectral equation for black body radiation for the continuous spectra of celestial bodies which had the following properties: the spectral distribution of radiation depends only on the temperature, the total irradiated energy is finite, the wavelength of the intensity maximum is inversely proportional to the temperature.

His work was published in 1885 in Hungarian and in 1890 in German, 15 years before the work by Planck[1] and eight years before Wien's work on black body radiation).[2]

Using his spectral equation, he estimated the temperature of several celestial bodies, including the Sun.[3]

He also formulated laws to establish the epicenters of earthquakes.

He was an assistant to Loránd Eötvös.

In 1895, he was elected as a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and later (1909) as a full member.[4]

His first and most outstanding disciple was the astrophysicist Béla Harkányi.