Urbain Le Verrier

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Urbain Le Verrier
Signature Urbain Le Verriers

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier or Urbain Leverrier (born March 11, 1811 in Saint-Lô , France , † September 23, 1877 in Paris ) was a French mathematician and astronomer . He worked for a large part of his life at the Observatoire de Paris , of which he was director, and was next to John Couch Adams through their theoretical prediction of orbital disturbances the discoverer of the planet Neptune , what through the observation of Johann Gottfried Gallehas been confirmed. The discovery was celebrated in the 19th century as a great scientific achievement and as the triumph of celestial mechanics, which had dominated France since Pierre Simon de Laplace . The discovery of Neptune was also seen as a national science competition between England and France.

life and work

Le Verrier first attended the polytechnic school in Caen . Later he was a student at the College Louis le Grand in Paris. The first time he took the tough entrance exams for the elite Ecole Polytechnique , he failed, and his father sold his house in Saint-Lo to finance his son's preparation for the next exams at the Mayer Institute in Paris, where he was a student of Mathematician Choquet was. In the exams in 1831 he came second and was able to begin his studies at the Ecole Polytechnique. After graduating in 1833 (classified eighth of his year) he turned to industrial chemistry and was a student of Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac in Orsay . He was interested in the tobacco industry and dealt with phosphor chemistry (important for matches). In 1837 he married the daughter of his former math teacher Choquet, with whom he had three children. He continued his research under Gay-Lussac and also gave private mathematics lessons and was a teacher at the Collège Stanislas.

In 1836 he applied as a tutor at the Ecole Polytechnique both in chemistry (with Gay-Lussac, but Victor Regnault got the post ) and in astronomy (with Felix Savary ) and became a tutor in astronomy ( Eugène Catalan and Charles Delaunay soon followed suit Repetitor colleague from Le Verrier at Savary). He represented Savary when he fell ill in 1840, but was succeeded by Michel Chasles . His first publication in astronomy was on secular perturbations of planetary orbits (1839). Further work followed in which he was able to assign several comet observations to the same comet. By taking into account the disturbance of their orbits by Jupiter, he was able to show that they are not the orbits of different comets. In 1846 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences.

His greatest success - supported by François Arago - was the calculation of the probable orbit of the planet Neptune , which he had determined from the orbital disturbances found in the orbit of Uranus . The first publication on this was in 1845, and in 1846 he showed that the disturbances could not have come from the known planets, and in August he predicted the position of the new planet. At the same time, the then English student John Couch Adams tried to determine the position of the planet suspected behind Uranus. However, his calculations were far more inaccurate than Le Verrier's. On August 31, 1846, Le Verrier submitted his studies to the Paris Academy . Since there was still no French astronomer available to search for the new planet, Le Verrier wrote to the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle on September 18, 1846 , because he had sent Le Verrier a copy of his impressive doctoral thesis a year earlier. The letter arrived in Berlin on September 23, 1846, and that same evening Galle went to look for it with the 22-centimeter Fraunhofer refractor at the Berlin observatory . In just half an hour he found the new planet, just one degree of arc from the position Le Verrier had predicted. The angular diameter of the new planet and its movement in the sky were also almost exactly what Le Verrier had predicted.

In 1854 he succeeded François Arago as director of the Paris Observatory, where he had a strict supervision that made him unpopular. Le Verrier was dissatisfied with having to turn to Berlin beforehand to discover Neptune, and saw it as his task to thoroughly renew the work at the Paris observatory. Many employees left and in 1870, due to the conflicts that had arisen, Le Verrier was replaced by Charles Delaunay as director. When Delaunay died in an accident in 1872, he was reinstated as director, but his administration of the observatory was closely supervised from now on. Le Verrier himself suffered from liver disease from 1873 onwards.

1855 Le Verrier tried of using the same method as in the discovery of Neptune, perturbations Mercury ( perihelion ) declare the existence of a planet postulated within the orbit of Mercury and called this volcano . Astronomers around the world tried to find this planet, but to no avail. In 1915 Albert Einstein showed with the general theory of relativity that the orbital disturbances can be explained solely by the gravity field of the sun.

Le Verrier's grave on the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris

Le Verrier was also known for several tables of planets, which were the basis for calculating the ephemeris of the planets until the 20th century . Its orbits of several comets were also significant .

The scientist also went down in history as the inventor of the weather map . He first set up a weather forecast for France for February 19, 1855, 10 o'clock, based on data communicated by telegram, which he presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences. As a result, the meteorological service was established in France.

Honors and memberships

In January 1846, Le Verrier became a member of the Académie des sciences. In December 1846 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1847 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1848 a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . Since 1854 he was a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In 1863 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In 1868 (for his planet tables) and 1876 he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society .

Le Verrier is immortalized by name on the Eiffel Tower, see: The 72 names on the Eiffel Tower . The lunar crater Le Verrier and the asteroid (1997) Leverrier are named after him.

literature

  • Friedrich Becker : history of astronomy . BI university pocket books Volume 298, 3rd edition, Bibliogr.Inst., Mannheim – Vienna – Zurich 1968.
  • Jacques R. Lévy: Le Verrier, Urbain Jean Joseph . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 8 : Jonathan Homer Lane - Pierre Joseph Macquer . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1973, p. 276-279 .
  • William Sheehan, Richard Baum: In Search of Planet Vulcan: The ghost in Newton's clockwork universe , Plenum 1997
  • William Sheehan, Nicholas Kollerstrom, Craig B. Waff: The Neptune Affair . Spectrum of Science , April 2005, pp. 82–88 (2005), (Original: The case of the pilfered planet, did the British steal Neptune ?, Scientific American, December 2004)
  • James Lequeux: Le Verrier - Magnificient and detestable astronomer , Springer 2013

Web links

Commons : Urbain Le Verrier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Bührke: Great moments of astronomy: from Kopernikus to Oppenheimer, Munich 2001, p. 154f.
  2. ↑ Thomas Bührke: Great moments of astronomy: from Kopernikus to Oppenheimer, Munich 2001, p. 150.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Herbrandt: Our daily riddle: the weather . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , January 7, 2006.
  4. ↑ 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. 147.
  5. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 18, 2020 .


personal data
SURNAME Le Verrier, Urbain
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Verrier, Urbain Jean Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician and astronomer
BIRTH DATE March 11, 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint-Lô
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1877
PLACE OF DEATH Paris