Astronomer Biography 2

FRIEDRICH GEORG WILHELM VON STRUVE

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve was born on April 15, 1793 and died in 1864. He was born in Altona, Denmark, and area that is now part of Germany. As a young man he moved to Russia to avoid military conscription in Germany during the Napoleonic wars. He conducted most of his work in Russia.

After graduating from the University of Dorpat in 1810, he turned his attention to astronomy, mathematics, and geodesy. He began to work in the university’s observatory and was eventually put in charge of it. He also taught mathematics and astronomy at Dorpat and became a popular lecturer. His first volume of observations was published in 1817, and seven other volumes followed.

Because of Struve’s improvements to equipment and methods at Dorpat, he was invited to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences to be the director of a new observatory. Struve helped with the design of the observatory and gathered state-of-the-art instruments, including a fifteen inch refracting telescope, which was the largest in the world at the time. The observatory was completed in 1839, and it soon became evident that it was one of the best in the world.

Some of Struve’s most influential work deals with double stars. He was the world’s foremost observer of double stars during his life. He studied William Herschel’s work on double stars when he was at Dorpat. By determining the revolutions of several binary stars, he finished some of what Herschel had started. Struve published a 795-item catalog of all known double stars in 1822. He continued on to observe more than 122,000 stars and discover 3,112 double stars. In 1837 he published Stellarum duplicium et multiplicium mensurae micrometricae, an important work that contained accurate measurements of most of these newly-discovered double stars. His identifying numbers are still used, and some of the stars have been renamed in his honor.

Although Struve was not the first to study stellar parallaxes, he was one of the first to do so accurately. He was, however, the first to measure the parallax of Vega. This work allowed him to better estimate the distances between some stars and Earth. He included some of his calculations in Stellarum duplicium et multiplicium mensurae micrometricae.

Struve also worked on various other projects. He attempted to determine whether there is a dependence between the brightness of stars and their distances. He supported the fact that the Sun is not the center of the Milky Way. His work supported the theory that the interstellar medium is not a complete vacuum. He concluded that there is sparse matter in space and that the intensity of light diminishes as it passes through it; his approximate calculation of this absorption is close to the currently accepted value. Struve also measured the aberration of light, which causes celestial objects to appear to move.

Struve produced 272 astronomical works and continued a family of astronomers; his son carried on his work, and his great-grandson was even more prolific and was one of the first astronomers to believe in extraterrestrial life. As a member of over forty scientific academies, Struve was famous during his lifetime and was one of the most prominent astronomers of the nineteenth century.


Works Cited

"Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve Biography." Biography.com. Web. < http://www.biography.com/articles/Friedrich-Georg-Wilhelm-Struve-9497860 >.

"Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve." NNDB. Web.< http://www.nndb.com/people/202/000097908/ >.

"Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve." Encyclopedia.com. Web. < http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404706203.html >.

"Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm (or Vasily Yakovievich)." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 13. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 108-113. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Sarasota County High. 6 Jan. 2010 < http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=GVRL&u=fl_sarhs >.

"Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von (1793-1864)." The Internet Encyclopedia of Science. Web. < http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/Struve_FGW.html >.