Edmund halley

Edmund Halley or Edmond Halley (UK: /ˈɛdmənd ˈhæli/; London, October 29 (Julian) / November 8 (Gregorian) 1656-Greenwich, January 14, 1742) was a English astronomer, mathematician, and physicist, known for calculating the orbit of Halley's Comet. He was a friend of Isaac Newton and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Biography

Halley was born in Haggerston in Middlesex. According to Halley, his date of birth was October 29^Jul./ November 8, 1656^greg.. His father, Edmond Halley Sr., came from a Derbyshire family and was a wealthy soap maker in London. It was his father who helped him with his curiosity to explore space, buying him the latest astronomical inventions. At the age of 17 he moved to Oxford. Halley took with him a 24-foot-long telescope, apparently paid for by his father. From a young age he had a great inclination for mathematics and was interested in the investigation of the heavens by the astronomer John Flamsteed. In 1676 he published in Philosophical Transactions a dissertation on the theory of planets.

The same year he moved to the island of Santa Elena to observe the stars of the southern sky and make a catalog of them. He brought watches, micrometers, and a large refracting telescope 7.3 meters long, which he used to great advantage, despite the bad weather conditions. The result was the Catalogus stellarum australium, published in London in 1679, a work that tabulated the position of 341 southern stars.

A friend of Isaac Newton, he encouraged him to write his Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica. It is possible that in Newton's time they would not have been published had it not been for his friendship with Halley, since it is known that the former was not concerned with the publication of his work. Halley not only paid for the printing but also took care of proofreading and other editorial duties. The original book was sold to bookshops for six shillings, unbound.

On his return from Saint Helena, in 1678, he received his master's degree at Oxford. The same year he was elected a member of the Royal Society, of which he became successively clerk in 1686 and secretary in 1702, but he was never its president. That honor fell to Newton in 1703.

Newton's theory of universal gravitation prompted him to calculate the orbit of a comet for the first time, the one of 1682, announcing that it was the same one that had been seen in 1531 and 1607, and announcing that it would happen again in 1758 The comet was named in his honor and is known today as 1P/Halley.

18th century

I'm looking for the Royal Society.

From 1698 to 1700 he traveled the coasts of southern Africa and America, engaged in the theory of terrestrial magnetism on the ship Paramore, a pink (Dutch plan ship and of round and wide forms, well adapted to dangerous oceans). The most important fruit of these two expeditions was the first chart of the variation of the magnetic declination, with the isogonal curves.

During it, he thought about the possibility of estimating the age of the Earth by calculating the concentration of salt in the seas, assuming that the deposition of all terrestrial rivers had been constant over time. He later carried out this experiment, which yielded an age higher than that indicated in the Bible.

In 1712, without the permission of the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, he published a star map using the material obtained by him. In 1725 an authorized edition would appear in three volumes, which had the exact position of 3000 stars determined from the recently inaugurated Greenwich Observatory.

In 1693 and 1716 he published in Philosophical Transactions his method for determining the parallax of the Sun by means of the transits of Venus. In 1718 he drew attention to the proper motion of various fixed stars, reflected on the possibility of measuring stellar distances by means of stellar parallax, and approximately calculated the distance between the Sun and Sirius, which he estimated to be 120,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

These calculations encouraged the Irish astronomer Samuel Molineux to try to measure (in 1725) the parallax of Gamma Draconis: after several months he failed to measure the parallax of the star but instead his assistant, James Bradley, discovered the aberration of the light.

On Flamsteed's death in 1720 he succeeded as Second Astronomer Royal and Director of Greenwich Observatory, a post he held until his death. He married Mary Tooke in 1682 and they had two daughters and a son. Halley died in Greenwich in 1742 at the age of 85.

Succession of Astronomers Royals:

Eponymy

• The famous Halley comet.
• The Halley crater on the moon.
• Halley crater, Mars.
• The Halley base, scientific installation at Halley Bay (Antartártida).
• The Halley diving bell, invented in 1717.