William Herschel bio

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.