Édouard Roche

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Édouard Albert Roche (1820-1883) was a French scientist.

He is famous for his theory that the planetary rings of Saturn were formed when a large moon came too close to Saturn and was pulled apart by gravitational forces. He also gave his name to both the Roche limit as well as the unrelated concept of the Roche lobe, a useful concept when dealing with the gravitational interaction of a binary star system.

Born in Montpellier, he was appointed professor at his alma mater, the University of Montpellier, where he served in the Faculté des Sciences starting in 1849. Roche made a mathematical study of Laplace's nebular hypothesis and presented his results in a series of papers to the Academy of Montpellier from his appointment until 1877. The most important were on Comets (1860) and the Nebular Hypothesis itself (1873). As can been seen, Roche's studies examined the effects of strong gravitational fields upon swarms of tiny particles.

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