Who is William Herschel?
Known for his discovery of the planet Uranus and infrared radiation, the German-born British Astronomer was primarily a composer.
While everyone's eyes were on the James Webb Space Telescope, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, a great development took place in the Canary Islands, a little west of Africa, right under our noses, that will open the veil of mystery about the birth of the Milky Way galaxy: The William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands. The plugin installed is one of the most extraordinary engineering marvels of the last period. With its new capacity, the telescope will be able to catalog 5 million stars at an unprecedented speed.
William Herschel (1738 – 1822)
William Herschel, who lived from 1738 to 1822, is one of the world's best-known astronomers. Even today, many astronomy scholars work on the research paths he has discovered. Herschel was born in Hannover, Germany. Although he had a great interest in astronomy from a very young age, he spent most of his time studying music. He went to England in 1757 and settled there. He started playing the organ in a church. He also earned his living by giving music lessons. Thus, he taught music for twenty-six years. He also began building a telescope in 1773. After eight years of struggling, he was able to achieve his goal and complete the telescope. With this telescope, Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.
Since prehistoric times no scholar has been heard of discovering planets. Because of this success, Herschel, the then King of England III. George was awarded the honor of royal astronomer. Herschel was later knighted.
William Herschel made and sold telescopes of various sizes and paid for the telescopes he had built for himself. Meanwhile, with a telescope he made, he discovered two satellites of both Uranus and Saturn.
He married a wealthy woman in London in 1788. Thus, he was saved from wasting time to generate income by making and selling telescopes in order to carry out his scientific research. He devoted himself entirely to his work in astronomy. He mostly focused on the distances of the planets from each other and from the sun. By the way, the spots on Mars show how long it took this planet to revolve around the sun; the oblateness of the planet Jupiter, how long it takes to orbit the sun; He discovered the orbits of Uranus and Saturn. He described these discoveries in his scientific memoirs, which he presented to the Royal Astronomical Society at the age of eighty-four.
Two more valuable astronomers with the same surname were brought up from Sir William Herschel's family. One of them was his sister, Caroline Lucretaa Herschel (1750-1848); the other is his son, Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871). Caroline Herschel helped her sister work. He later discovered many star clusters, 8 comets. Sir John continued the work left unfinished by his father, and discovered 3,350 double stars, which could only be seen with a telescope, apart from each other.