Mr. Percival
Hon. Astronomy
07 Jan 2010
Astronomer Biography: Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve
Friedrich Georg Struve was born in April 15, 1793 and lived a long and successful life and later died in November 23, 1864. He was born in Altona, Denmark. Altona Denmark is currently part of Germany. He was the son of a fellow astronomer, Jacob Struve. Counting himself and his father there would be five generations of astronomers in his family. These astronomers in his family include Otto Struve, Otto Wilhelm von Struve, and Hermann Struve. He married a woman named Emilie Wall in 1815. They had 12 children together but only 8 survived early childhood. One of his sons Genrickh Vasilevich Struve became a prominent chemist and his other son Bernhard Vasilyevish Struve served as a government official in Siberia. He had many children who grew up to become very influential people. Unfortunately his wife died in 1834, he later remarried Johanna Henriette Francisca Bartels. He had 6 more children with Joanna. One of which was Karl de Struve he served as a Russian Ambassador to The united States, Japan, and Netherlands. Jacob Struve, Friedrich Struve’s father moved his family to Livonia, in Imperial Russia. He did this in order to stay away from military services. Friedrich was first interested in the study of philology, the study of words. He studied at the University of Tartu which is in Estonia. Fortunately he found philology to be dull and then turned to astronomy for more excitement, which he studied at the same school. He started teaching in 1813 Tartu at the University of Tartu. He also observed at Dorpat Observatory on his free time which was also in Tartu. Later in his teaching career in 1820 he became a full time professor and still found time to managed to be the director of the Dorpat Observatory. In the Dorpat Observatory he researched double stars and geodesy. In 1839 he founded and directed a new Obervatory, the Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg. He was given many honors one of the most regarded ones was in 1826 he was honored by the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1862 Friedrich Georg Struve retired on account of his failing health. He died two years later on November 23,1864. Friedrich Struve did a lot of different work and observations but he is most widely known for his observations on double stars. He worked on his double star observations for many years. He exceeded past astronomers that observed double stars like William Herschel and John Herschel and Sir James South. He found many double stars in 1827 in this year he published his double star catalogue Catalogus novus stellarum duplicium. Struve’s observations were so exact and tedious that he made micrometric measurements of 2714 double stars around 1824, it took him many years to published his measurements in his work Stellarum duplicium et multiplicium mensurae micrometricae. He was also the first person to measure the parallax of the star Vega. Struve was one of the first Astronomers to recognize the effects of interstellar extinction even thought he could not provide a reason to help better understand the effects of interstellar extinction. He also was remarkably close to the modern estimate of the average rate of visual extinction he believed it was 1 mag per kpc and the modern believe is 0.7 to 1.0 mag per kpc. Along with Astronomy he started the Struve Geodetic Arc, which consisted of a chain of surveys triangulations stretching from Hammerfest, Norway to the Black Sea, ten countries wide and over 2,820km long.
No comments:
Post a Comment