Astronomy Flashcards
Who was the first Astronomer Royal? Appointed by Charles II following the creation of the post, he held the position from 1675 until his death in 1719.
His main achievements were the preparation of a 3,000-star catalogue, Catalogus Britannicus, and a star atlas called Atlas Coelestis, both published posthumously. He also made the first recorded observations of Uranus, although he mistakenly catalogued it as a star, and he laid the foundation stone for the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
John Flamsteed
Who was the second Astronomer Royal from 1720 until his death in 1742?
He is best known for a comet named after him. It was named upon its return in 1758, as he predicted, but he did not live to see. From observations he made in 1682, he used Newton’s laws of motion to compute the periodicity of the comet in his 1705 Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets.
From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, he catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He also helped to fund Newton’s Principia.
Edmond Halley
Who was the third Astronomer Royal from 1742 until his death in 1762?
He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light (1725–1728), and the nutation of the Earth’s axis (1728–1748).
James Bradley
Who was the fourth Astronomer Royal from 1762 until his death in 1764?
He studied at Oxford University and became the Savilian Professor of Geometry in 1742. His work included lectures on arithmetic, algebra, and geometry and he made important meridian observations of a comet and an annular eclipse visible from Greenwich. Many of his observations were useful for solving the longitude problem, and they were bought by the Board of Longitude after his death. In 2000 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the Moon after him, in commemoration of his position as Astronomer Royal.
Nathaniel Bliss
Who was the fifth Astronomer Royal from 1765 until his death in 1811?
He held the office from 1765 to 1811. He was the first person to scientifically measure the mass of the planet Earth. He created the British Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris for the Meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich using Johann Tobias Mayer’s corrections for Euler’s Lunar Theory tables.
In 1774, he undertook the Schiehallion experiment using a plumb line on the mountain to mean density of the Earth. Unlike his four predecessors, he was the first Astronomer Royal to command a significant salary and dedicate much of his time to the position.
Nevil Maskelyne
Who was the sixth Astronomer Royal from 1811 until 1835?
During his administration, he effected a reform of practical astronomy in England comparable to that brought about by Friedrich Bessel in Germany. In 1821 he began to employ the method of observation by reflection and in 1825 devised means of combining two mural circles in the determination of the place of a single object, the one serving for direct and the other for reflected vision, improving accuracy. Under his auspices the instrumental equipment at Greenwich was completely changed and the number of assistants increased from one to six. He was also a recepient of the Lalande Prize and the Copley Medal.
John Pond
Who was the seventh Astronomer Royal from 1835 until 1881?
His many achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the Earth, a method of solution of two-dimensional problems in solid mechanics and, in his role as Astronomer Royal, establishing Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.
In December 1826 was appointed Lucasian professor of mathematics in succession to Thomas Turton. This chair he held for little more than a year, being elected in February 1828 Plumian professor of astronomy and director of the new Cambridge Observatory. He was awarded the Lalande Prize and the Copley Medal amongst various other prizes.
He is also remembered for his determination of the mean density of the Earth in the Harton pit in South Shields and his slowness to act in the race for the discovery of Neptune.
George Biddell Airy
Who was the eighth Astronomer Royal from 1881 until 1910?
Having been Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich from 1870 to 1881, he was appointed to replace George Airy. He was also fourth wrangler in 1868.
He was also the first Astronomer Royal to retire at 65 (all previous incumbents bar Airy and John Pond had died in office; John Pond had been forced by poor health to resign in 1835, while Airy retired aged 81).
William Christie
Who was the ninth Astronomer Royal from 1910 until 1933?
He is remembered today largely for introducing time signals (“pips”) from Greenwich, England, and for the role he played in proving Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He was second wrangler in 1889 and previously held the position of Astronomer Royal for Scotland fm 1905 to 1910. He is the only Astronomer Royal to have previously held this position.
He was also noted for his study of solar eclipses and was an authority on the spectrum of the corona and on the chromosphere.
Frank Watson Dyson
Who was the tenth Astronomer Royal from 1933 unti 1955?
He became renowned as an authority on positional astronomy. He previously served as His Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope from 1923 until 1933 and worked on proper motions and occultations of stars.
He is also remembered today for famously stating “space travel is bunk” only two weeks before the Sputnik 1 launch in October 1957, and also believing that “generations will pass before man ever lands on the moon and that, should he eventually succeed in doing so, there would be little hope of his succeeding in returning to the Earth”.
Harold Spencer Jones
Who was the eleventh Astronomer Royal from 1956 until 1971?
He specialized in solar astronomy and in 1939 he was appointed director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory in Canberra, Australia before moving to back to UK to take up his appointment as Astronomer Royal.
He is also known for his initial disbelief in the practicalities of space flight, a notion he shared with his predecessor Harold Spencer Jones, reportedly stating that “space travel is utter bilge” upon his appointment in 1956. However, he objected to the cost as much as he did the practicality, also stating “it would cost as much as a major war just to put a man on the moon”, which proved accurate.
Richard van der Riet Woolley
Who was the twelth Astronomer Royal from 1972 until 1982?
He developed revolutionary radio telescope systems (aperture synthesis) and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources. In 1946, he and Derek Vonberg were the first people to publish interferometric astronomical measurements at radio wavelengths. With improved equipment, he observed the most distant known galaxies in the universe at that time. He was the first Professor of Radio Astronomy in the University of Cambridge and founding director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory.
During his tenure, in 1974, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Antony Hewish, for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics. It was the first time the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for astronomical research.
Martin Ryle
Who was the thirteenth Astronomer Royal from 1982 until 1990?
In the late 1940s he worked at the University of Cambridge on the Long Michelson Interferometer.
In 1964 he was appointed Professor of Radio Astronomy the University of Manchester and in 1981 director of the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories, part of the University of Manchester at Jodrell Bank. He was also Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory from 1975 to 1981.
He lived with his wife Elizabeth in the Old School House in Henbury, Cheshire, from 1981 until her death in 2021. They had met when they were both working with his predecessor, Martin Ryle, in 1945-46 in Cambridge in the early days of radio astronomy.
Francis Graham-Smith
Who was the fourteenth Astronomer Royal from 1991 until 1995?
He was Professor of Physics at Durham University from 1965 until 1992, and served as president of the European Physical Society (1999–2001). He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1981 to 1983.
Holding various academic posts throughout his career, in 1965, he was part of the team that first detected neutrinos at the Kolar Gold Fields. Much of his research focussed on cosmic radiation.
Arnold Wolfendale
Who is the fifteenth and current Astronomer Royal? He has held the position since the retirement of his predecessor Arnold Wolfendale in 1995.
The first Astronomer Royal to not retire in his 60s since the seventh Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, he is a cosmologist and astrophysicist who studied for the tripos and undertook post-graduate research at Cambridge and completed a PhD supervised by Dennis Sciama in 1967. He later became the Plumian Professor at the University of Cambridge until 1991, and the director of the Institute of Astronomy.
He is the author of more than 500 research papers and has made contributions to the origin of cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as to galaxy clustering and formation. His studies of the distribution of quasars led to final disproof of steady state theory. He was one of the first to propose that enormous black holes power quasars, and that superluminal astronomical observations can be explained as an optical illusion caused by an object moving partly in the direction of the observer.
He was has received numerous awards and was made a life peer in 2005. He is a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, but has no party affiliation when sitting in the House of Lords.
Martin Rees
