Pietro Giannone

Italy

1937-2016

Obituary:

I communicate to Division G and to the IAU bodies the death of the member Pietro Giannone, deceased on November 25th 2016.

We have lost another one of the pioneers of the study of stellar structure and evolution, as Pietro Giannone has been among the first italian researchers prominent in this field, starting in the sixties of last century. His most well known study is the first publication of the model attributing the nova explosion to the accumulation of hydrogen rich matter on the surface of a white dwarf (1967, in collaboration with A. Weigert). He worked at long on binary evolution with mass exchange in Rome, together with M.A. Giannuzzi, and on stellar structure models, in particular on horizontal branch evolution, together with V. Castellani and A. Renzini. His main interest then shifted to the study of the dynamical evolution of star clusters. He has been professor of Astronomy at La Sapienza University until his retirement.

Francesca D'Antona