An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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The contraction of a volume of gas under its → gravity, accompanied by the → radiation of the lost → potential energy as → heat.

After the Scottish physicist William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) and the German physicist and physician Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894), who made important contributions to the thermodynamics of gaseous systems; → contraction.