Astronomy

By kiele

  • Ole Rømer

    Ole Rømer
    Ole Rømer (born September 25, 1644, Århus, Jutland—died September 23, 1710, Copenhagen) was a Danish astronomer who demonstrated conclusively that light travels at a finite speed.

  • Francis Baily

    Francis Baily
    Francis Baily (born April 28, 1774, Newbury, Berkshire, Eng.—died Aug. 30, 1844, London) was an astronomer who detected the phenomenon called “Baily’s beads” during an annular eclipse of the Sun on May 15, 1836. His vivid description aroused new interest in the study of eclipses.

  • Max Wolf

    Max Wolf
    Max Wolf (born June 21, 1863, Heidelberg, Baden [Germany]—died Oct. 3, 1932, Heidelberg) was a German astronomer who applied photography to the search for asteroids and discovered 228 of them.

  • Charles Greeley

    Charles Greeley
    Charles Greeley Abbot (born May 31, 1872, Wilton, N.H., U.S.—died Dec. 17, 1973, Riverdale, Md.) was an American astrophysicist who, as director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Washington, D.C., for almost four decades, engaged in a career-long campaign to demonstrate that the Sun’s energy output varies and has a measurable effect on the Earth’s weather.

  • Asaph Hall

    Asaph Hall
    Asaph Hall (born Oct. 15, 1829, Goshen, Conn., U.S.—died Nov. 22, 1907, Annapolis, Md.) was an American astronomer who discovered the two moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, in 1877 and calculated their orbits.

  • Walter Adams

    Walter Adams
    Walter Adams (born December 20, 1876, Syria—died May 11, 1956, Pasadena, California, U.S.) was an American astronomer who is best known for his spectroscopic studies. Using the spectroscope, he investigated sunspots and the rotation of the Sun, the velocities and distances of thousands of stars, and planetary atmospheres.

  • Sir Frank Dyson

    Sir Frank Dyson
    Sir Frank Dyson (born January 8, 1868, in Measham, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, England—died May 25, 1939, at sea, en route from Australia to England) was a British astronomer who in 1919 organized observations of stars seen near the Sun during a solar eclipse, which provided evidence supporting Einstein’s prediction in the theory of general relativity of the bending of light in a gravitational field.

  • Georges Lemaître

    Georges Lemaître
    Georges Lemaître (born July 17, 1894, Charleroi, Belgium—died June 20, 1966, Leuven) was a Belgian astronomer and cosmologist who formulated the modern big-bang theory, which holds that the universe began in a cataclysmic explosion of a small, primeval “super-atom.”

  • Ken Freeman

    Ken Freeman
    Ken Freeman (born August 27, 1940, Perth, Western Australia, Australia) is an Australian astronomer known for his work on dark matter and the structure and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  • Sir Martin Ryle

    Sir Martin Ryle
    Sir Martin Ryle (born Sept. 27, 1918, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.—died Oct. 14, 1984, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire) was a British radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems and used them for accurate location of weak radio sources. With improved equipment, he observed the most distant known galaxies of the universe. Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research.