Urbain Le Verrier
Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier Urbain Leverrier or even ( born March 11, 1811 in Saint- Lô, France, † September 23, 1877 in Paris) was a French mathematician and astronomer. He worked most of his life at the Observatoire de Paris and was one of the discoverers of the planet Neptune.
Life and work
Le Verrier first attended the Polytechnic School at Caen. Later he was a student at the College Louis -le-Grand in Paris and studied from 1831 at the École polytechnique. First, he was employed as an engineer and in 1839 as a teacher of Geodesy. Soon, however, turned to astronomy and in particular the Laplace founded by celestial mechanics, where he analyzed the stability of the solar system.
His biggest success was 1845 - promoted by François Arago - the calculation of presumptive orbit of the planet Neptune, which he had determined from observed perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. At the same time the then British student John Couch Adams had attempted to determine the position of the suspected behind Uranus planet. His calculations, however, were much less accurate than Le Verrier. On August 31, 1846 Le Verrier presented his investigations of the Paris Academy. As yet no French astronomer ready was to search for the new planet Le Verrier wrote on 18 September 1846 the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, because of the previously Le Verrier had sent a copy of his impressive thesis one year. On September 23, 1846 letter arrived in Berlin, and on the very same evening Galle made with the 22 - inch Fraunhofer refractor of the Berlin Observatory on the search. After only half an hour, he found the new planet, at a distance of only one degree of arc from the position predicted by Le Verrier. Also, the angular diameter of the new planet and its motion in the sky corresponded almost exactly Le Verrier's predictions.
Later Le Verrier tried to explain using the same method, perturbations of Mercury ( perihelion ), postulated the existence of a planet inside the orbit of Mercury and named this volcano. Astronomers all over the world trying to find this planet, but without success. 1915, Albert Einstein and the general theory of relativity, that can be explained solely by the perturbations of the gravitational field of the sun.
Other important works by Le Verrier related to celestial mechanics, where he set up several tables of the planets, which were the basis for calculating the ephemeris of planets until the 20th century. Also significant were its orbit determinations of several comets.
The scientists also went down in history as the inventor of the weather map. He built the first time for the February 19, 1855, 10 clock, on telegraph reported data, a weather forecast for France, which he presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences. As a result, the meteorological service began in France.
In 1853 Le Verrier, director of the Paris Observatory and the successor of François Arago. He held until 1870 this office. In 1876 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Le Verrier 's name immortalized on the Eiffel Tower, see: The 72 names on the Eiffel Tower.