Peter Florian
Mr. Percival-Period 5
Astronomy
7 January 2014
William Herschel Biography
Frederick William
Herschel was a German astronomer of the late 18th/early 19th century. He lived
with his family in Germany until he eventually moved the Britain at the age of
19. Herschel's mother gave birth to ten children, and his father played the oboe
in symphonies. Herschel started out his life as a musician who played the
violin, cello, harpsichord, and the organ. He wrote 24 symphonies, of which
four are well known, and played first violin and first organ in many
orchestras. Herschel's brother and sister were also musicians who sometimes
played with him in the Octagon Chapel in Bath.
Herschel's musical interest made him fond of
mathematics, and his interest in astronomy started when he met English
Astronomer Nevil Maskelyne. He started building personal reflecting telescopes,
and spent as much as 12 hours a day grinding, polishing, and fixing metal
primary mirrors. He started looking at the stars and planets in the early
1770's, and kept an astronomical journal. Herschel's early observations focused
on closely grouped stars which he believed to be double-stars. He published his
hypothesis that these stars orbited under mutual gravitational attraction, and
proved it in the early 1800's. He discovered over 800 confirmed double or
multi-star systems.
In 1781, when Herschel was searching for
double-stars, he discovered a nonstellar disk object beyond the orbit of
Saturn. He originally thought it was a comet or star, but a colleague of his
computed that the object was probably planetary. He agreed, and named the new
planet the "Georgian star" after King George III. The name never
stuck, and Uranus was universally adopted. The King was so astonished by this
discovery that he named Herschel "The King's Astronomer". Herschel
discovered that sunlight contained infrared radiation when he was looking at
sun spots and researching with filters.
With the help of his son John and sister
Caroline, Herschel began to search for deep sky objects. He and his siblings
discovered over 2400 objects known as nebulae, which he posted in three famous
catalogs under eight different classifications. He created the NGC method for
naming deep sky objects, which is still the most universal way to name them.
Herschel discovered two moons of Saturn (Mimas and Enceladus), and two moons of
Uranus (Titania and Oberon), which were named by his son John. He studied the
axis tilt of Mars and was the first astronomer to discover that the solar
system is moving through space. He also created the term asteroid.
William married his sweetheart Mary and only
had one child. In 1816, Herschel was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order
by Prince Regent, which entitled him the prefix "Sir". He helped
found the Astronomical Society of London in 1820. On August 1822, Herschel died
at the same Observatory House that his son John was born in. He is still very
much respected and his works noted by many Astronomers today.
