Erika Helga Ruth Böhm-Vitense (June 3, 1923 – January 21, 2017)[1] was a German-born American astrophysicist known for her work on Cepheid variables and convection in stellar atmospheres.
Böhm-Vitense was born Erika Helga Ruth Vitense on 3 June 1923 in Kurau, Germany.
Erika successfully defended her thesis Continuous absorption coefficients as a function of pressure and temperature in the Sun in 1951 and received her doctorate degree.
Around 1978, Erika realized that the ultraviolet band of light was the best way to make observations of stellar chromospheres.
[7] Erika has over 300 academic papers on the Harvard Astrophysics Data System, of which she is the first author on more than two-thirds of these publications.