Struve

German–Russian astronomer (1793–1864)

Struve, who was born at Altona in Germany, moved to Dorpat in Latvia in 1808 in order to escape conscription into the Napoleonic army then in control of Germany. He took a degree in philology in 1811 before becoming professor of astronomy and mathematics in Dorpat in 1813. In 1817 he became director of the Dorpat Observatory, which he equipped with a 9.5-inch (24-cm) refractor that he used in a massive survey of binary stars from the north celestial pole to 15°S. He measured 3112 binaries – discovering well over 2000 – and cataloged his results in Stellarum Duplicium Mensurae Micrometricae (1837; Micrometric Measurements of Double Stars).

In 1835 Czar Nicholas I persuaded Struve to set up a new observatory at Pulkovo, near St. Petersburg. There in 1840 Struve became, with Friedrich Bessel and Thomas Henderson, one of the first astronomers to detect parallax. He chose Vega, a bright star with a larger-than-normal proper motion and soon established a parallactic measurement (that was, however, too high).

Struve founded a dynasty of astronomers that is still in existence. He was succeeded by his son Otto at Pulkovo, his grandson Hermann became director of the Berlin Observatory, and his great-grandson, Otto Struve, became director of the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.

The German-born Russian astronomer and geodesist Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (1793-1864) is noted for his observations of double stars and for the measurement of the meridional arc from the north coast of Norway to Ismail on the Danube.

On April 15, 1793, F. G. W. von Struve was born in Altona, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. After escaping in 1808 from a French press gang seeking recruits for Napoleon's army, he entered the University of Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia). His brother, Karl, taught philology there, and the younger Struve decided to follow his footsteps; he completed his studies and received a degree in philology by December 1810.

Under the influence of the physicist Georg Friedrich Parrot, Struve developed an interest in the exact sciences, especially astronomy. In 1812 he began his first astronomical observations at Dorpat Observatory, and later he was appointed extraordinary professor of mathematics and astronomy as well as observer there. From 1818 to 1838, under Struve's leadership, the work at Dorpat Observatory achieved international acclaim, particularly after 1824, when Struve received the Fraunhofer equatorial telescope with the 9.6-inch achromatic objective lens - the largest aperture for its day.

Struve elected to study double (binary) stars with his newly acquired telescope. From November 1824 to February 1827, he spent 320 hours in the course of 138 nights, observing roughly 400 stars per hour, for a total of 120,000 stars, of which 2,200 were doubles. He published his studies on multiple-star systems in Catalogus novus (1827), Mensurae micrometricae (1837), and Positiones mediae (1852). His examination of binary stars demonstrated that Isaac Newton's law of gravitation operates outside the solar system and is therefore a universal law and that multiple-star systems are not rare. For his scientific accomplishments Struve was elected to full membership in the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences.

In 1830 Czar Nicholas I set aside land in the Pulkovo Hills outside St. Petersburg as the site for a new astronomical observatory and selected Struve for the commission responsible for its construction. When the Pulkovo Observatory opened in 1839, it could boast not only of Struve's being its first director but also of housing a telescope with a 15-inch objective lens. It was the best-equipped observatory in Europe.

At Pulkovo Observatory, Struve continued observing binary stars and moved into the areas of practical astronomy and geodesy. The observatory's staff also made numerous measurements of geographic points in Russia to supply information necessary for road building, railways, and military needs, and in 1845 Struve helped to found the Russian Geographical Society. After his death on Nov. 23, 1864, his son, Otto Wilhelm Struve, continued the Struve dynasty in Russian astronomy; his directorship of Pulkovo Observatory began in 1858 and lasted until 1899.

Further Reading

There is no definitive biography of Struve in English or Russian. Scattered references to his accomplishments appear in the technical work by Robert G. Aitken, The Binary Stars (1918); in Hector MacPherson, Makers of Astronomy (1933); in the highly readable book by Pierre Rousseau, Man's Conquest of the Stars (trans. 1959); and in Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture (1963).

For more information on Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, visit Britannica.com.

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (1793-1864)
Born	April 15, 1793 (1793-04-15) Altona
Died	November 23, 1864 (1864-11-24)
Nationality	Russian
Fields	astronomy
Alma mater	University of Tartu

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (Russian: Vasily Yakovlevich Struve) (April 15, 1793 – November 23, 1864 (Julian calendar: November 11)) was a Baltic-German astronomer from a famous dynasty of astronomers.

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 Family 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Life

He was born at Altona then part of Denmark, in what is now Germany, the son of Jacob Struve (1755–1841), and was the second of an entire family of astronomers through five generations. He was the great-grandfather of Otto Struve and the father of Otto Wilhelm von Struve. He was also the grandfather of Hermann Struve, who was Otto Struve's uncle. Struve's father Jacob moved the family from French-occupied Germany to Livonia in Imperial Russia to avoid military service.

In 1808 he entered the University of Tartu in Estonia, where he first studied philology, but soon turned his attention to astronomy. From 1813 to 1820 he taught at the university and observed at Dorpat Observatory in Tartu, and in 1820 became a full professor and director of the observatory.

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve remained at Tartu, occupied with research on double stars and geodesy until 1839, when he founded and became director of the new Pulkovo Observatory near St Petersburg. Among other honors, he won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1826, and was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1833. He retired in 1862 due to failing health.

The asteroid 768 Struveana was named jointly in his honour and that of Otto Wilhelm von Struve and Karl Hermann Struve.

Works

Struve's name is best known for his observations of double stars, which he carried on for many years. Although double stars had been studied earlier by William Herschel and John Herschel and Sir James South, Struve outdid any previous efforts. He discovered a very large number of double stars and in 1827 published his double star catalogue Catalogus novus stellarum duplicium.

Since most double stars are true binary stars rather than mere optical doubles (as William Herschel had been the first to discover), they orbit around one another's barycenter and slowly change position over the years. Thus Struve made micrometric measurements of 2714 double stars from 1824 to 1837 and published these in his work Stellarum duplicium et multiplicium mensurae micrometricae.

Struve carefully measured the "constant of aberration" in 1843. He was also the first to measure the parallax of Vega, although Friedrich Bessel had been the first to measure the parallax of a star (61 Cygni).

In an 1847 work, Etudes d'Astronomie Stellaire: Sur la voie lactee et sur la distance des etoiles fixes, Struve was one of the first astronomers to identify the effects of interstellar extinction (though he provided no mechanism to explain the effect). His estimate of the average rate of visual extinction, 1 mag per kpc, is remarkably close to modern estimates (0.7-1.0 mag per kpc).

He was also interested in geodetic surveying, and in 1831 published Beschreibung der Breitengradmessung in den Ostseeprovinzen Russlands. He initiated the Struve Geodetic Arc, which was a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, through ten countries and over 2,820 km. UNESCO has the chain on its List of World Heritage Sites in Europe.

Family

In 1815 he married Emilie Wall (1796 – 1834) in Altona, who bore 12 children, 8 of which survived early childhood. In addition to Otto Wilhelm von Struve, other children were Heinrich or Genrikh Vasilyevich Struve (1822 – 1908), a prominent chemist, and Bernhard Vasilyevich Struve (1827 – 1889), who served as a government official in Siberia and later as governor of Astrakhan and Perm.

After his first wife died, he remarried to Johanna Henriette Francisca Bartels (1807 – 1867), a daughter of the mathematician Martin Bartels^[1], who bore him six more children. The most well-known was Karl de Struve (1835 – 1907), who served successively as Russian ambassador to Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands.

Bernhard's son Pyotr Berngardovich Struve (1870-1944) is probably the best known member of the family in Russia. He was one of the first Russian marxists and penned the Manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party upon its creation in 1898. Even before the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Struve left it for the Constitutional Democratic party, which promoted ideas of liberalism. He represented this party at all the pre-revolutionary State Dumas. After the Russian Revolution, he published several striking articles on its causes and joined the White movement. In the governments of Pyotr Wrangel and Denikin he was one of the ministers. During the following three decades, he lived in Paris, while his children were prominent in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

See also

• Struve family

References

1. ^ (Russian) Struve dynasty (PDF)

External links

• (Russian) Genealogy

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