Джонатан Гомер Лейн (9 августа 1819, Дженесео, шт. Нью-Йорк, США – 3 мая 1880, Вашингтон, США) — американский астрофизик-теоретик, создатель первой теории внутреннего строения Солнца.

Lane was particularly interested in astronomy, and was the first to perform a mathematical analysis of the Sun as a gaseous body. His investigations demonstrated the thermodynamic relations between pressure, temperature, and density of the gas within the Sun, and formed the foundation of what would in the future become the theory of stellar evolution (see Lane-Emden equation).

In 1869 Lane read a paper, “On the Theoretical Temperature of the Sun,” before the National Academy of Sciences. It was printed in the American Journal of Science in the following year. His purpose was to test the adequacy of various current theories of heat by mathematical determinations of the temperature of the sun, on the assumption of a convection system, explicitly based upon James Espy’s meteorological theories, for the movement of the photosphere. Lane concluded that none of the theories that assumed that heat was motion provided adequate explanations of his calculated values for the distribution of density, pressure, and temperature in the sun.

The paper gained a modest notoriety because of something it did not demonstrate but which Lane verbally proved to the satisfaction of both Kelvin and Newcomb. According to the latter’s autobiography, Lane had given the proof to him prior to 1869 of the “law” by which a gaseous body contracts when it loses heat, but the heat generated by the contraction exceeds the heat lost in order to produce the contraction. Lane did not give the proof in his paper, although it was implicit in the presentation. Kelvin’s interest stemmed in part from the possibility that “Lane’s law” would contradict his calculation of the age of the earth by changing the quantity of energy available in the sun. Three years after Lane’s paper August Ritter independently came to similar conclusions, including an explicit statement of the “paradoxical” law. Interestingly, Ritter also was applying meteorological theory to the study of the sun. Kelvin attempted to remove the supposed difficulty in 1887, for which he was subsequently criticized for “inexactitude” by Emden in 1907.

The principal significance of Lane’s article, however, was not unstated law nor even its testing of current theories of heat but the careful calculation of mass and heat relationships in the sun. The convection model, now discarded, proved useful for arriving at a good first approximation of the structure and energy distribution of the sun, while Lane’s work on the structure of a star was a real contribution to the developing evidence of stellar evolution (leading to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of 1913).

• Эмден, Роберт
• Звезда

• Бронштэн В.А. Гипотезы о звездах и Вселенной. — М.: Наука, 1974.
• Goddu A. Digges, Thomas // in: The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. — Springer, 2007.
• Stevenson-Powell C. Homer Lane and the Internal Structure of the Sun // Journal for the History of Astronomy. — 1988. — Vol. 19.

• Lane, Jonathan Homer (Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography) (англ.)