Friedrich Georg Struve

Andrew Sanderson
Period 3
Due 11 January 2011

Friedrich Georg Struve

Friedrich Georg Struve was born in Germany on April 15th 1793 into a fairly wealthy and well educated family. When he reached the age of conscription he was sent away to live with his brother in Russia. He graduated from the Russian University Dorpat in 1810 with a degree in philology. However, he did not want to pursue a career in this subject, so instead he began to study mathematics, astronomy, and geodesy. He got his doctorate for accurately determining the location of his university’s observatory and then began to teach. He taught for 25 years in which he lectured in math and astronomy. Astronomically, Struve is famous for many things, most notably in his research and observation of double stars, the observation and determination of stellar parallaxes, the distribution of stars in space, the observation of planets, the moon, comets, and auroras. He also created new and better instruments and refined the old ones to get more accurate and reliable measurements and data. One example of these new instruments he created was when he added a meridian circle and a nine-inch refracting telescope, which was the largest at that time, to the observatory. After this he then moved to a newer observatory in St. Petersburg. He was appointed to the position of director of installation and was tasked with getting the best instruments he possibly could. Among the several new instruments he ordered was a 15 inch refracting telescope, which was now the largest one ever made. After this time he observed about 122,000 stars from the North Pole to 15 degrees south declination. Among these stars he discovered 3,112 double stars, which had previously been undetected. He then began to make micro metric measurements of these stars and tried to determine their angular separations and parallaxes. However, because of the age in which he did this and the limits of his instruments, he was unable to determine very many of the parallaxes accurately, as many of them were less than .5”. With respect to the research he did about the distribution of stars, he wanted to determine if there was a statistical dependence between the brightness of stars and their distance. Among the many conclusions of this research, he was able to conclude that the Sun doesn’t lie at the center of our galaxy, but is rather above its plain. Struve also postulated that light traveling through the Universe is absorbed, so that distant stars cannot be seen because the light from them isn’t bright enough to reach Earth, and the value he came up with is still in use today. Struve also did a lot of research in the field of geodesy. He came up with rational methods to figure out the time, latitude, and azimuth of celestial objects. By doing this he was able to eliminate systematic error that plagued the old methods. At the end of his life he was a member of over 40 scientific academies and universities and founded the Russian Geographical Society. He died on November 23, 1864 and was survived by his wife and 12 children, some of whom went on to do notable astronomical research.