William Herschel Biography

Sir William Herschel, also known as Frederick William Herschel, was born on November 15^th 1738 in Hannover, Germany. He was brought up in a very musical home with an older brother and sister where both of his parents were proficient musicians. Accordingly, he became a band boy with the Hanoverian Guards where he was happy and very talented. Soon after that, he volunteered for the military for a brief time only to stop due to the realization of a weak immune system and delicate health. In 1757, he left Germany with his father and headed to England. The rest of his family joined him after he took up residence and made a life there. In 1781, Herschel used a small, handheld telescope no more than seven inches long to notice a small disk-like object and thought that it was an undiscovered comet. After continuing the study of this object over a few months, he learned that it was actually an undiscovered planet. At first, he wanted to name it Georgium Sidus after king George the third but other astronomers didn’t like the name and thus he eventually chose the name Uranus after the god of the skies. Due to this discovery, Herschel got a pension of about two hundred pounds per year as well as got knighted and title the “King Astronomer”. Due to this new income, Herschel could spend all of his time in astronomy instead of having a job and doing it in his spare time. Herschel created his own telescope that was a little over forty feet long with an array of stands and ladders. While standing on the ladder and looking through the telescope, Herschel would explain various descriptions of things he thought were interesting in the sky while she would draw and write them down at the bottom of the structure. Due to the immense size of the telescope he couldn’t actually rotate it, only move it along the single strip of path allowed by the array. Using this telescope and method along with various other tactics, William was able to discover a very large number of nebulae and properly document them. Herschel’s son actually took his father’s telescope to South Africa and made a variety of observations and then published them in a catalog in 1864. These observations included 5100 objects, 4630 of which  were discovered solely by the Herschel family. The catalog what titled, “The General Catalog of Nebulae”. In 1785, Herschel came up with the idea of the disc theory of the stellar system. This anticipated the shape of our galaxy as we know it today to be the spiral shape. Herschel coined the term nebulae since he believed that all nebulae are clusters of stars like an island nebulae. He even discovered the infrared range of sunlight. So that he could interpret the difference between all of his discovered star clusters, he created the theory of the evolution of stars to emphasize their densities relative to each other. He did this by contrasting a cluster of tightly packed stars with others that were scattered. The theory states that no matter what, over time the stars, even the scattered ones, would slowly come together into their own tightly packed clusters. Herschel also coined the name “asteroids” for the bodies of rock that he discovered in 1801. In 1787, Herschel discovered two moons around Uranus, Titania and Oberon. In 1789, he used his large telescope to find Saturn's sixth and seventh moons, Enceladus and Mimas. He was so  famous, in fact, that he had an asteroid named after him, the asteroid 2000 Herschel. Two years before his death, he was elected vice president of the newly formed Royal Astronomical Society in 1820 and president the year after that. His last published paper was a catalog of 145 double stars. He died in 1822 and is buried in Berkshire, England.