Hans Suess
The chemist who in 1956, with Harold Urey, drew up the first reliable table of how common each element is in the Solar System.
Key facts
- Born
- 1909
- Died
- 1993
- Nationality
- Austrian-born American
- Field
- Physical chemist
Hans Eduard Suess was born in Vienna, the grandson of the famous geologist Eduard Suess. He studied chemistry, worked in Hamburg during and after the war, and moved to the United States in 1950, later helping to found the University of California, San Diego.
With Harold Urey he collected analyses of meteorites, especially chondrites, together with measurements of the Sun and stars. In 1956 they published a table of the abundances of the elements and their isotopes in the Solar System. It showed clear patterns: peaks and troughs that matched the ways atoms are built inside stars.
That table became one of the foundations of a new understanding of how the elements are made. The following year, a famous paper by Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle used such abundance patterns to explain how stars create almost every element heavier than helium.
Suess is also remembered for discovering, in the 1950s, that burning fossil fuels was diluting the radioactive carbon in the atmosphere, now called the Suess effect, and for his part in calibrating radiocarbon dating. He showed again and again how careful chemistry could reveal processes far beyond the laboratory.