Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin

Wargentin is a redirect to this article. For the lunar crater see Wargentin (moon crater) .

Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin

Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin (born September 11 ^{. Jul} / 22. September  1717 ^greg. In Sunne ( Jämtland ), Sweden ; † 13. December 1783 in Stockholm ) was a Swedish astronomer .

Life

Wargentin became interested in astronomy at an early age and when he was 12 years old, he and his father Wilhelm Wargentin observed a lunar eclipse. In 1735 he began his studies at Uppsala University , which he graduated in 1743. In 1737, Professor Anders Celsius suggested to him to observe the eclipse of the Galilean moons by Jupiter more closely.

In 1741, after four years of work, Wargentin presented his observation and calculation results at the just completed observatory in Uppsala - Tabulae pro calculandis eclipsibus satellitum Jovis in Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiarum Upsalaiensis pro 1741 (printed in 1746). These observations were more accurate than those of its predecessors and showed that the moons orbited Jupiter irregularly. He suspected that the cause was the mutual attraction between the moons. He also confirmed James Bradley's finding that the three Galilean moons Io , Europa and Ganymede always occupy the same position after a period of 437 days, 19 hours and 41 minutes. In doing so, he encouraged Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1766 and Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1788 to work out an explanation using Isaac Newton's theory of gravity . The coupling of the orbital times of the three moons in a ratio of 1: 2: 4 is called Laplace or orbit resonance today .

After his doctorate in 1743 and his professorship in astronomy in 1748, he became permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 1749 . In 1753 he took over the management of the Stockholm observatory , procured equipment from Daniel Ekström, John Bird and John Dollond and moved into the building. As secretary he published the meeting reports and expanded the academy through many contacts with European scientists. He participated in the determination of the earth-sun distance by observing the Mars opposition in 1752 and the Venus transit in Stockholm in 1761 and 1769.

From 1749 onwards, he collected personal data from church registers in his register of tables, which had to be kept from 1686. This made Sweden the first country in the world with population statistics. Today this work is done by the Central Statistical Office (SCB).

In 1756 he married Christina Magdalena Raab. She had three daughters and died of a miscarriage in 1769.

In 1754 he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences , in 1781 in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1783 a foreign member of the Paris Académie des Sciences . Since 1760 he was an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . The lunar crater Wargentin and a secondary school in Östersund ( Wargentinsskolan ) were named after him.

His study is shown in what is now the Observatory Museum in Stockholm.

literature

• Sten Lindroth: Wargentin . In: Dictionary of Scientific Biographies , Vol XIV, pp. 178-179
• P.Wargentin: Study of Inequalities . In: The Royal Swedish Akad. d.Wiss. Treatises from the theory of nature, household arts and mechanics . Volume 10, pp. 169-188 (1748, German 1758)
• NVE Nordenmark: Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin . Uppsala 1939 (Swedish)
• Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin . In: Theodor Westrin, Ruben Gustafsson Berg, Eugen Fahlstedt (eds.): Nordisk familjebok konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi . 2nd Edition. tape 31 : Ural vertex . Nordisk familjeboks förlag, Stockholm 1921, Sp. 668 (Swedish, runeberg.org ).
• Biographical article. In: Svenska Familj-Journalen , 1879 (Swedish)

Web links

• Correspondence between Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin and Carl von Linné

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 252.