23-02-2008 Irish Astronomers (Article126)

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Simon Kenny
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Location: Shannon, Co. Clare, Ireland

23-02-2008 Irish Astronomers (Article126)

Post by Simon Kenny » Fri Jan 02, 2009 4:38 pm

Irish Astronomers (Article126)

For a small island, Ireland has contributed more than its fair share to the scientific discoveries of the past three centuries. The first extant report of an Irishman embroiled with medieval church authorities about scientific matters concerns St. Vergilius (Fergal), who ministered as a priest in Bavaria in the Eighth Century and was attacked by a fellow churchman for heresy. Vergilius had proposed that the Earth was a sphere and that people could live in the antipodes without falling off! The controversy is somehow reminiscent of Galileo’s confrontation with church authorities over other radical scientific ideas, centuries later. Vergilius appears to have escaped unharmed in body and reputation, as he was later made bishop of Salzburg.

Though born in Copenhagen in 1852, John Dreyer lived in Ireland for many years and worked as assistant to Lawrence Parsons, the Fourth Earl of Rosse, whose father built the great 72-inch telescope, ‘The Leviathan of Parsonstown’. Parsons, though eclipsed by his famous father, conducted significant studies of his own, including determining the temperature of the Moon’s surface, in which he was assisted by the young Dreyer. Dreyer’s major achievement was the compilation of the New General Catalogue of stars (NGC), mostly based on the observations of astronomer Sir William Herschel. He expanded the original catalogue of nearly 8,000 stars with a supplementary catalogue of another 5,000 stars. The NGC remains a key reference for astronomers to this day.

Sir Howard Grubb, born in 1844, inherited his father’s telescope design and manufacturing business in Dublin and made many very fine instruments to grace some of the world’s finest observatories. Specialising in refractor and reflector telescope designs, he made a 10-inch refractor for Armagh Observatory in 1882 and a massive 28-inch refractor for Greenwich Observatory in 1893.

One of the great astronomers of the Nineteenth Century was Sir William Parsons, Third Earl of Ross. On the grounds of his demesne in Birr, Co Offaly, he constructed the world’s first 72-inch telescope. In the age of steam, he had to conceive, plan and execute a project that required the construction of a massive telescope, including its huge mirror and support systems, all of which had to work together with a jeweller’s precision. His determination paid off when his telescope gave him unparalleled views of stars, planets, nebulae and galaxies. His telescope was unrivalled for seventy years.

Born in 1943, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell began her interest in astronomy early through her father, who was architect of Armagh Planetarium, near their home. In the 1960s, she became involved in research into quasars, recently discovered and very bright distant galaxies. Bell-Burnell, while working on her PhD thesis in 1967, discovered and identified the first pulsar, a rapidly rotating, extremely dense remnant of a supernova explosion. Its radio pulse was so regular it seemed artificial, so it was dubbed ‘Little Green Man 1’. Although controversially, she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for her discovery, Bell-Burnell is honoured worldwide for her achievements.

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