Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers (October 11, 1758–March 2, 1840) was a German astronomer, physician, and physicist.

[edit] Life and career

He was born in Arbergen, near Bremen, and studied to be a physician at Göttingen. After his graduation in 1780, he began practicing medicine in Bremen, Germany. At night he dedicated his time to astronomical observation, making the upper storey of his home into an observatory. He also devised the first satisfactory method of calculating cometary orbits.

On March 28, 1802, Olbers discovered and named the asteroid Pallas. Five years later, on March 29, 1807, he discovered the asteroid Vesta, which he allowed Carl Friedrich Gauss to name. As the word "asteroid" was not yet coined, the literature of the time referred to these minor planets as planets in their own right. He proposed that the asteroid belt, where these objects lay, were the remnants of a planet that had been destroyed. This theory is now discarded by most of the scientific community.

On March 6, 1815, Olbers also discovered a periodic comet named after him (formally designated 13P/Olbers).

Olbers was deputed by his fellow-citizens to assist at the baptism of Napoleon II of France on June 9, 1811, and he was a member of the corps legislatif in Paris 1812-1813. He died in Bremen at the age of eighty-one. He was twice married, and one son survived him.

Olbers' paradox, described by him in 1823 (and then reformulated in 1826), is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the supposition of an infinite and eternal static universe.

[edit] Honors

The following celestial features are named for him:

• 13P/Olbers is a periodic comet.
• Asteroid 1002 Olbersia.
• Olbers crater on the Moon.
• Olbers, a 200 km-diameter dark albedo feature on Vesta's surface

[edit] References

• Cunningham, C. J. (2006). The Origin of the Asteroids: Olbers versus Regner. Star Lab Press. ISBN 0-9708162-5-1. 
• Bessel, F. W.. "Über Olbers. Von Herrn Geh.-Rath Bessel". Astronomische Nachrichten 22: 265. 
• William Herschel (1800 - 1814). "Observations on the Nature of the New Celestial Body Discovered by Dr. Olbers, and of the Comet Which Was Expected to Appear Last January in Its Return from the Sun.". Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1: 271-272. 
• Lynn, W. T. (1907). "The discovery of Vesta". The Observatory 30: 103-105. 

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. - see, for instance, "Olbers," Britannica