A wealthy English amateur astronomer who was the first to use spectroscopy to determine the compositions of astronomical objects (1861). He determined that the Sun and the stars are made mostly of hydrogen, and together with his wife, Margaret Huggins, examined the spectra of nebulae and comets. At the age of 30 he sold the family business and built a private observatory 8 kilometers outside London. After Gustav Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen's 1859 discovery that spectral emission and absorption lines could reveal the composition of the source, Huggins took chemicals and batteries into the observatory to compare laboratory spectra with those of stars. First visually and then photographically he explored the spectra of stars, nebulae, and comets. He was the first to show that some nebulae, including the Orion Nebula, have pure emission spectra and thus must be truly gaseous, while others, such as that in Andromeda, yield spectra characteristic of stars. However, he attributed the brightest lines in nebular spectra to a new unknown element that he called “nebulium.” He was also the first to attempt to measure the radial velocity of a star.
Copyright © 2004 by Wiley-Blackwell. Wiley and the Wiley logo are registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.
