James Keeler Biography

Andrew Sanderson

24 February 2011

Astronomy Honors

Mr. Percival

James Keeler Biography

            James Edward Keeler was born in La Salle, Illinois on September 10, 1857. His most famous contributions to astronomy were that the rings of Saturn are composed of small particles and that there a very large number of spirals among nebulae. His mother, Anna, was the daughter of the governor of Connecticut and his father, William F. Keeler, was a paymaster in the U.S. Navy. Keeler attended high school until his family moved to Florida and then pursued no higher education for a while. He eventually attended John Hopkins University and served as an assistant to physicist, Charles Hastings. He eventually ended up in Allegheny, where he became the first professional astronomer to reside on Mount Hamilton. Here he used a 36 inch refracting telescope equipped with a spectroscope to measure wavelengths of the very bright spectral lines of nebulae. With this data he was able to tell if they were blue shifted or red shifted and therefore able to tell if they were moving towards or away from the Earth. He also discovered wavelengths that didn’t correspond to any transitions that had been observed on Earth. This lead to the idea that nebulae were comprised of something that wasn’t present on Earth, however this turned out to be incorrect as it was the combination of the motion of the atoms and the filtering effects of the nebulae that caused these lines. Shortly after this discovery he married Cora Slocomb Matthews only to take a journey back to Allegheny observatory. Once here he designed his own spectrograph, which allowed pictures to be taken of the spectral lines instead of simply looking at them through a telescope. This invention allowed the spectral lines of stars to be recorded and saved for later times and also to be analyzed much more effectively than they could have with a spectroscope. An example of how much more effective this new invention was is how Keeler used it shortly after its conception. He used was able to obtain proof that the theoretical prediction of James Maxwell that the rings of Saturn were meteoric in nature was correct. Another major discovery of Keeler was the how the number of spiral nebulae, which later turned out to be other galaxies, outnumbered the quantities of any other hazy object in the night sky. He was attempting to design a slitless spectrograph that could be used in conjunction with the 36 inch telescope when he suffered a heart and died at the age of 42 on August 12, 1900. Despite his relatively short life, Keeler was able to make many contributions to modern day astronomy that greatly changed how the universe is viewed.