Karl Hermann Struve (October 3, 1854 – August 12, 1920) was a Russianastronomer. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as German Ottovich Struve (Герман Оттович Струве) or German Ottonovich Struve (Герман Оттонович Струве).
The Russian Empire, also known as Imperial Russia or simply Russia, was an empire that existed across Eurasia and North America from 1721, following the end of the Great Northern War, until the Republic was proclaimed by the Provisional Government that took power after the February Revolution of 1917.
An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets, and galaxies – in either observational or theoretical astronomy. Examples of topics or fields astronomers study include planetary science, solar astronomy, the origin or evolution of stars, or the formation of galaxies. Related but distinct subjects like physical cosmology, which studies the Universe as a whole.
Russian is an East Slavic language, which is official in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 25 December 1991. Although, nowadays, nearly three decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian is used in official capacity or in public life in all the post-Soviet nation-states, as well as in Israel and Mongolia, the rise of state-specific varieties of this language tends to be strongly denied in Russia, in line with the Russian World ideology.
Herman Struve was a part of the famous group of astronomers from the Struve family, which also included his grandfather Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, father Otto Wilhelm von Struve, brother Ludwig Struve and nephew Otto Struve. Unlike other astronomers of the Struve family, Herman spent most of his career in Germany. Continuing the family tradition, Struve's research was focused on determining the positions of stellar objects. He was particularly known for his work on satellites of planets of the Solar System and development of the intersatellite method of correcting their orbital position. The mathematical Struve function is named after him.
The Struve family were a Baltic German noble family of Eastphalian origin and originated in Magdeburg, the family produced five generations of astronomers from the 18th to 20th centuries. Members of the family were also prominent in chemistry, government and diplomacy.
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was a German-Russian astronomer and geodesist from the famous Struve family. He is best known for studying double stars and for initiating a triangulation survey later named Struve Geodetic Arc in his honor.
Otto Wilhelm von Struve was a Baltic German astronomer. In Russian, his name is normally given as Otto Vasil'evich Struve. Together with his father, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, Otto Wilhelm von Struve is considered a prominent 19th century astronomer who headed the Pulkovo Observatory between 1862 and 1889 and was a leading member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Biography
Herman was born in 1854 in Tsarskoye Selo, a former Russian residence of the imperial family and visiting nobility, located 26 kilometers (16mi) south from the center of St.Petersburg. He attended gymnasium in Vyborg and in 1872 entered the Tartu University (Tartu was known then as Dorpat). While studying there, in 1874–1875, Struve participated in an expedition to observe transit of Venus through the disk of the Sun. That observation was carried out at Port Poisset on the Asiatic East Coast. After graduation in 1877, he became a member of the Pulkovo Observatory and was sent abroad for two-year post-graduate studies. Accompanied by his cousin's husband, Struve stayed in several cities, including Strasbourg, Paris, Milan, Graz and Berlin, learning from such celebrities as Helmholtz, Kirchhoff, Boltzmann and Weierstrass. After returning to Russia, he joined the staff of Pulkovo Observatory, studying the satellites of Saturn among other things.[1]
Tsarskoye Selo was the town containing a former Russian residence of the imperial family and visiting nobility, located 24 kilometers (15 mi) south from the center of Saint Petersburg. It is now part of the town of Pushkin. Tsarskoye Selo forms one of the World Heritage site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments. During the Soviet times it was known as Detskoye Selo.
Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow, with 5 million inhabitants in 2012, part of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration with a population of 6.2 million (2015). An important Russian port on the Baltic Sea, it has a status of a federal subject.
Vyborg is a town in, and the administrative center of, Vyborgsky District in Leningrad Oblast, Russia. It lies on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of the Vyborg Bay, 130 km to the northwest of St. Petersburg and 38 km south of Russia's border with Finland, where the Saimaa Canal enters the Gulf of Finland. The population of Vyborg has developed as follows: 79,962 (2010 Census); 79,224 (2002 Census); 80,924 (1989 Census)..
In 1881, Struve obtained his master's degree at the University of Tartu, with the highest honors, and in 1882 defended a PhD thesis at Saint Petersburg University (Pulkovo had no associated educational institutions). Both works were in the field of optics, in particular, the master thesis was titled "On Fresnel interference phenomenon – theoretical and experimental work" – according to Struve himself, despite the family traditions, he did not intend then to become an astronomer. Later, however, he became excited with his father's project of building a 30-inch telescope at Pulkovo, with its fantastic new possibilities for observation. Struve made extensive use of this telescope in his work. In 1883, he was appointed adjunct astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory.[1]
Saint Petersburg State University is a Russian federal state-owned higher education institution based in Saint Petersburg. It is the oldest and one of the largest universities in Russia.
By then, the Struve family was highly respected in Russia and Tsar Alexander III had a strong wish for Hermann to succeed his father Otto as the director of the Pulkovo Observatory. However, Hermann politely declined the offer, mentioning that he was in the middle of crucial observations of Saturn which would be interrupted by administrative tasks. In 1890, Struve was appointed as the senior astronomer at Pulkovo with the clear understanding that he should become director after completing his Saturn work. However, the death of Alexander III in 1894 freed Struve from this task. Pro-Russian views were gradually developing in Russian society, including science, and foreigners felt progressively more alienated. Therefore, when in 1895 Struve was offered the position of professor at Königsberg University, he gladly accepted and moved his family to Germany.[1] There, he succeeded Wilhelm Julius Foerster as director of Königsberg Observatory. Struve was also called for the task of rescuing the Berlin Observatory. It was then located in the center of Berlin where astronomy observations were not practical and rents were too high, and discussions of its relocation stalled. Struve managed to sell the old observatory site so profitably that he could build a new observatory from scratch. The location was chosen at Neubabelsberg, near Potsdam and 25 kilometers (16mi) from the center of Berlin, and the new institution was named Berlin-Babelsberg Observatory. There, he started installing a 26-inch Zeissrefractor and a 48-inch reflector, which would then become the largest telescope in Germany. While he did not get to operate them himself due to delays caused by World War I, the refractor was much used by his son Georg, and the reflector by his lesser-known grandson Wilfried.[1]
Alexander III was the Emperor of Russia, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland from 13 March [O.S. 1 March] 1881 until his death on 1 November [O.S. 20 October] 1894. He was highly conservative and reversed some of the liberal reforms of his father, Alexander II. During Alexander's reign Russia fought no major wars, and he was therefore styled "The Peacemaker".
Wilhelm Julius Foerster was a German astronomer. His name can also be written Förster, but is usually written "Foerster" even in most German sources where 'ö' is otherwise used in the text.
Potsdam is the capital and largest city of the German federal state of Brandenburg. It directly borders the German capital, Berlin, and is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. It is situated on the River Havel 24 kilometres southwest of Berlin's city centre.
Hermann Struve
In 1905, Struve became professor of the University of Berlin[2] and from 1904 until his death in 1920, he served as director of the Berlin-Babelsberg Observatory.[3][4][5] Struve's death was accelerated by a heart illness which he suffered from during his late years and by a bad fall from a tram car in 1919. He broke a thigh, and while recovering in a sanatorium in Bad Herrenalb, died of a heart attack.[1]
A sanatorium is a medical facility for long-term illness, most typically associated with treatment of tuberculosis (TB) in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century before the discovery of antibiotics. A distinction is sometimes made between "sanitarium" and "sanatorium".
Bad Herrenalb is a municipality in the district of Calw, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated in the northern Black Forest, 15 km east of Baden-Baden, and 22 km southwest of Pforzheim.
Myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops to a part of the heart, causing damage to the heart muscle. The most common symptom is chest pain or discomfort which may travel into the shoulder, arm, back, neck, or jaw. Often it occurs in the center or left side of the chest and lasts for more than a few minutes. The discomfort may occasionally feel like heartburn. Other symptoms may include shortness of breath, nausea, feeling faint, a cold sweat, or feeling tired. About 30% of people have atypical symptoms. Women more often present without chest pain and instead have neck pain, arm pain, or feel tired. Among those over 75 years old, about 5% have had an MI with little or no history of symptoms. An MI may cause heart failure, an irregular heartbeat, cardiogenic shock, or cardiac arrest.
Family matters
Whereas many colleagues described Struve as a stern and serious person, within his family, he was seen as a cultivated man, who enjoyed music and friends and was very proud of the Struve family traditions. Yet even among relatives, he was known as inflexible in matters of principle.[1]
In 1885, Struve married the daughter of a cousin of his father. They had a son, Georg Otto Hermann, and a daughter, Elisabeth. George was born on 29 December 1886 in Tsarskoye Selo, Russia, and later became a famous astronomer.[6] Hermann's wife Eva Struve played an important role in rescuing his nephew Otto. After escaping from Soviet Russia in 1920, for a year and a half he was stranded penniless in Turkey. Otto wrote to his uncle for help, unaware of his death, but Eva asked assistance of Paul Guthnick, her late husband's successor at the Berlin-Babelsberg Observatory. Whereas Guthnick was not in a position to offer a job to Struve in Germany, he highly recommended Struve to the director of Yerkes Observatory in Chicago, who not only found a job for Struve at Yerkes, but also arranged a visa for him and paid for his travel.[7]
Research
As with all astronomers of the Struve family, Herman was mostly working on establishing position and movements of single and double stars and satellites of the planets of the Solar System. In 1885, a 30-inch refracting telescope was installed at Pulkovo, at the time the largest in the world (see great refractor). Struve was the first user of that telescope, which he used mostly for determining positions of a large number of double stars. His other major topic was Saturn, but he also studied Mars, Neptune and the fifth moon of Jupiter. He could not observe Uranus from Pulkovo because it was too far south. In 1888, Struve discovered libration of Hyperion (the seventh moon of Saturn) and explained it by the perturbing action of the largest Saturn's moon, Titan.[3] The same year, he introduced an intersatelite method of correcting orbital position of satellites. The method was rather successful because systematic errors in visual observations of some planets, such as Mars, were unacceptably large. Struve, however, realized that the method had flaws and recommended combining planet/satellite and intersatellite measurements.[8] In 1892, Struve discovered libration of two other moons of Saturn, Mimas and Enceladus.[3] His observations of the moon of Mars, Phobos, were later used by B. Sharpless in studying the secular acceleration of its orbit.[5][9]
Struve was known not only as an astronomer, but also as a mathematician. In 1882, he introduced a function to describe the intensity of a luminous line.[10][11] This function also describes solutions of Bessel's differential equation; it therefore is widely used in mathematics and is named the Struve function.
After moving to Königsberg Observatory, Struve built a 32.5-inch refractor telescope there and continued his work on the moons of Saturn, the last observations of which he made in 1916. His other topics included a study of atmospheric refraction, stellar parallaxes, drawings of Jupiter, determination of the position of Mars' equator, the amount of its oblateness and the rate of motion of the nodes.[6]
Yerkes Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin operated by the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It closed public operations in 2018. The observatory, which called itself "the birthplace of modern astrophysics", was founded in 1897 by astronomer George Ellery Hale and financed by businessman Charles T. Yerkes. It represented a shift in the thinking about observatories, from their being mere housing for telescopes and observers, to the early-20th-century concept of observation equipment integrated with laboratory space for physics and chemistry.
Otto Struve was a Russian-American astronomer. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as Otto Lyudvigovich Struve ; however, he spent most of his life and his entire scientific career in the United States. Otto was the descendant of famous astronomers of the Struve family; he was the son of Ludwig Struve, grandson of Otto Wilhelm von Struve and great-grandson of Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve. He was also the nephew of Karl Hermann Struve.
Sherburne Wesley Burnham was an American astronomer.
Gustav Wilhelm Ludwig von Struve was a Baltic German astronomer, part of the famous Baltic German Struve family. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as Lyudvig Ottovich Struve or Lyudvig Ottonovich Struve.
Johann Heinrich von Mädler was a German astronomer.
The Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, the principal astronomical observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located 19 km south of Saint Petersburg on Pulkovo Heights 75 metres (246 ft) above sea level. It is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.
The Berlin Observatory is a German astronomical institution with a series of observatories and related organizations in and around the city of Berlin in Germany, starting from the 18th century. It has its origins in 1700 when Gottfried Leibniz initiated the "Brandenburg Society of Science″ which would later (1744) become the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The Society had no observatory but nevertheless an astronomer, Gottfried Kirch, who observed from a private observatory in Berlin. A first small observatory was furnished in 1711, financing itself by calendrical computations.
The Tartu Observatory is the largest astronomical observatory in Estonia. On January 1, 2018, Tartu Observatory joined again to Tartu University, and the observatory is now an institute of the university. It is located on the Tõravere hill, about 20 km south-west of Tartu in Nõo Parish, Tartu County. The old Tartu Observatory located in Tartu city centre, is known internationally for its connection to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve and the Struve Geodetic Arc, of which it is the first reference point.
James Carpenter (1840–1899) was a British astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. During the 1860s he performed the first observations of stellar spectra at the observatory, under the direction of the Astronomer Royal George Airy. In 1861–62 he was one of three astronomers to successfully observe the dark underside of the rings of Saturn, the other two astronomers being William Wray and Otto Struve.
Alvan Clark & Sons was an American maker of optics that became famous for crafting lenses for some of the largest refracting telescopes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Founded in 1846 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, by Alvan Clark, and his sons George Bassett Clark (1827–1891) and Alvan Graham Clark (1832–1897). Five times, the firm built the largest refracting telescopes in the world. The Clark firm gained "worldwide fame and distribution", wrote one author on astronomy in 1899.
2227 Otto Struve, provisional designation 1955 RX, is an asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 4.7 kilometers in diameter. The asteroid was discovered on 13 September 1955, by the Indiana Asteroid Program at Goethe Link Observatory near Brooklyn, Indiana, United States. It was named after Russian astronomer Otto Struve.
Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) is a German research institute. It is the successor of the Berlin Observatory founded in 1700 and of the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam (AOP) founded in 1874. The latter was the world's first observatory to emphasize explicitly the research area of astrophysics. The AIP was founded in 1992, in a re-structuring following the German reunification.
Karl von Struve was a Russian nobleman and politician. He served, in turn, as Russian Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands.
Wilfried George Struve (1914–1992) was a German scientist. He started his career as a fifth-generation astronomer, a direct successor in the famous family line of Friedrich Georg Wilhelm, Otto Wilhelm, Hermann, Georg Hermann Struve. He fought for Germany in World War II and after the war changed his field from astronomy to acoustics.
Georg Otto Hermann Struve was a German astronomer from the Struve family and the son of Hermann Struve.
References
1 2 3 4 5 6 Batten, A. H. "The Struves of Pulkovo – A Family of Astronomers". Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. 71: 345. Bibcode:1977JRASC..71..345B. (contains a photo of Wilfried)
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