Maria Margaretha Kirch

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Maria Margaretha Kirch , née Winkelmann (born February 25, 1670 in Panitzsch near Leipzig , †  December 29, 1720 in Berlin ) was a German astronomer .

Life

Maria Margaretha Winkelmann was the youngest of three daughters of the Lutheran pastor Matthias Winkelmann († 1682) and the daughter of a book and cloth merchant Maria Töllner († 1683). The father is said to have awakened and encouraged her interest in astronomy. At the age of 13 she was orphaned by the death of her mother and has since grown up with her sister Sara Elisabeth. As a guardian she was educated and instructed by her father's pietistic successor in Panitzsch, Justinus Töllner, who later married her sister. Her second sister Anna Magdalena married his brother Heinrich Töllner. Maria Margaretha entered the household of the peasant astronomer Christoph Arnold, who was friends with Justinus Töllner, in the neighboring village of Sommerfeld , where she acquired basic knowledge and experience in the field of astronomical observations. It was there that she was introduced to the first basics of meteorology . At Arnold, she met her future husband, the widowed astronomer and calendar maker Gottfried Kirch , who was thirty years her senior , and who gave Arnold lessons in astronomy and made observations with him.

In May 1692 she married Gottfried Kirch, whom she supported with the observations and calculations. Both were radical Pietists and had to leave Leipzig in the course of the persecution of the Protestant reform movement due to the arrest of some fellow believers, whereupon they moved to Guben , the town where Gottfried was born . There she gave birth to her children Marie (1693–1697), Christfried , Christine and Sophie (1698–1699). Dorothea Johanna (1701–1771) and Margaretha were born in Berlin . From 1739 Dorothea Johanna was the third wife of the Brandenburg preacher Georg Christian Adler (1674–1751), the father of the preacher of the same name and antiquity researcher Georg Christian Adler . In his first marriage he was married to Sara Justina Töllner (1683–1718) from 1706, daughter of Justinus Töllner and Sara Elisabeth.

Maria Margaretha Kirch discovered the comet from 1702 and is therefore the first woman to discover a comet. She also made observations on the variable star Mira Ceti . Their children Christfried and Christine also supported their father. The discovery of the comet had been published by her husband, but in the year of his death Kirch referred to his wife's achievement in an academic pamphlet. Against this background, she applied for her husband's successor at the Academy of Sciences, but after a long period of deliberation, this application was rejected by the Executive Council in 1712 because of her gender. In 1712 she published a work about the imminent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn . Kirch continued her astronomical research in the observatory of Baron von Krosigk until he died in 1714. During this time she created astronomical calendars for the cities of Wroclaw and Nuremberg and published other observations.

From 1716 she was allowed to work again at the Academy of Sciences as assistant to her son Christfried Kirch , but in the following year she was banned from the academy's premises due to her scientific expertise. She died a few years later. The daughters Christine and Margarethe later also worked as their brother's assistants.

Honors

The asteroid (9815) Mariakirch is named after Maria Margaretha Kirch .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com
  2. ↑ 192.124.243.55
  3. ↑ Ursula Köhler-Lutterbeck, Monika Siedentopf: Lexicon of 1000 women . Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-8012-0276-3 , p. 189 f.
  4. ↑ Maria Margaretha Kirch in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).
personal data
SURNAME Kirch, Maria Margaretha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1670
PLACE OF BIRTH Panitzsch
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1720
Place of death Berlin