Dame Carole Jordan, astrophysicist who studied ‘cool stars’ and the Sun’s outer atmosphere
Professor Dame Carole Jordan, who has died aged 84, was an astrophysicist recognised internationally as an authority on the outer parts of the solar atmosphere known as the solar corona, and celestial entities known as “cool stars”; from 1994 to 1996 she was the first woman President of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).
Carole Jordan specialised in using X-ray and ultraviolet spectroscopy to analyse plasma – matter consisting of hot, ionised gas that accounts for more than 99 per cent of all observable matter in the Universe, including the Sun and other stars. She pioneered calculations to determine the relative number and densities of elements at different stages of ionisation.
Working first with observations from Nasa’s space station Skylab, and later from the International Ultraviolet Explorer and the Hubble Space Telescope, she researched solar spectra and developed an interest in the corona, which can be seen as a white halo during total solar eclipses. Her analysis of so-called emission lines – spectral lines produced when hot, low-pressure gas emits light at specific wavelengths – enabled her to identify the chemical elements involved.
She applied similar techniques to the plasma surrounding cool stars – faint stellar objects with surface temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Kelvin or less, which sometimes exhibit strong flares, intense stellar winds and complex magnetic activity, and developed techniques to determine from spectra the temperature of plasma as a function of height.
She was born on July 19 1941, to Reginald Jordan and Ethel, née Waller. From Harrow County Grammar School for Girls she read physics at University College London, where as an undergraduate she wrote a paper on how craters on the moon might become distorted.
Graduating in 1962, she embarked on a PhD in astrophysics under the Australian astronomer CW Allen, completing it, after time at the University of Colorado, Boulder, while attached to the spectroscopy division of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham. Her dissertation on “The Relative Abundance of Silicon Iron and Nickel in the Solar Corona” was published in 1965.
Carole Jordan began her academic career as an assistant lecturer in astronomy at UCL (1966-69). From 1969 to 1971 she was a research assistant at the Astrophysics Research Unit at Culham, where she remained until 1976, serving as Principal Scientific Officer from 1973.
In 1976 she moved to Oxford as a lecturer in physics and joined Somerville College as tutor in physics and Wolfson Tutorial Fellow in Natural Science, roles she held until her retirement in 2008. In 1996 she became one of the first female professors of astronomy, and she served as head of Oxford’s Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics from 2003 to 2008.
Both through her own example, and through leadership positions in institutions including the RAS, the Science and Engineering Research Council and the Institute of Physics, Carole Jordan did much to encourage girls to study technical subjects – although in an interview in 1987 she acknowledged peer group pressure against it, saying: “Girls don’t want to feel different at the age of 13 or 14.”
Her students came to appreciate that while her approach to her subject was intellectually demanding, she was a kindly woman, patient and supportive with those who struggled to match her high standards. She was concerned by the lack of opportunities for the best students to remain in academic life: a fellow physics tutor at Somerville, Roman Walczak, recalled that after she retired, she would always ask him the same question: “‘How many of our female students continue to a PhD?’ And her comment to my answer was always the same: ‘Try harder.’”
Carole Jordan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990 and appointed DBE in 2006. As well as being the first woman president of the RAS, she was only the third to win the RAS Gold Medal, in 2005.
Professor Dame Carole Jordan, born July 19 1941, died February 3 2026
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
