Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:59:08.684Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

26 - Solar Science and Astrophysics

from Part V - Mathematics, Astronomy, and Cosmology Since the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Joann Eisberg
Edited by
Mary Jo Nye
Mary Jo Nye
Affiliation:
Oregon State University
Get access

Summary

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, astronomy has changed from a relatively homogeneous discipline to one of tremendous diversity. Before this period, the main business of astronomy had been the measurement and prediction of planetary motion and stellar position. Earlier astronomers depended on a limited range of observational equipment – the optical telescope and various instruments for measuring angles and positions against the sky – in order to map the locations of the stars and to track the motions of the planets as they wandered against this fixed background. By the early nineteenth century, astronomers had, as theoretical tools, not only Newtonian gravitation but also the fruits of a century’s further refinement of celestial mechanics. Not only could astronomers calculate the orbits of individual planets around the Sun; they could also investigate the mutual perturbations of the various bodies and the stability of the solar system as a whole, far into the future. Within their well-defined realm, early-nineteenth-century astronomers congratulated themselves on possessing a predictive power exceeding that of all other fields of natural science.

Yet astronomers were eventually to trade their sure grasp of their traditional portion of the world for a much less certain hold on broad, new domains: the study not just of position and motion but also of the physical nature of celestial objects of all kinds, from the Sun, stars, and planets to nebulae and galaxies. This expansion of subject was, in significant part, technology driven, and many new observational technologies contributed to making it possible, including the building of telescopes with tremendously increased light-gathering power and finer resolution, and the introduction of photography as an astronomical tool.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 505 - 521
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, Robert d’Escourt and Houtermans, F. G., “Zur Frage der Aufbaumöglichkeit der Elemente in Sterne,” Zeitschrift für Physik, 54 (1929)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, Robert d’Escourt, “Atomic Synthesis and Stellar Energy, i, ii,” Astrophysical Journal, 73 (1931)Google Scholar
Atkinson, Robert d’Escourt, Astrophysical Journal, 84 (1936)CrossRef
Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm, Populäre Vorlesungen über wissenschaftliche Gegenstände (Hamburg: Perthes-Besser und Maucke, 1848)Google Scholar
Bethe, Hans Albrecht, “Energy Production in Stars,” Physical Review, 55 (1939).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bethe, Hans Albrecht and Critchfield, C. L., Physical Review, 54 (1938).
Burbidge, E. Margaret, Burbidge, Geoffrey R., Fowler, William A., and Hoyle, Fred, “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” Reviews of Modern Physics, 29 (1957).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burbidge, Geoffrey R., “Nuclear Astrophysics,” Annual Review of Nuclear Science, 12 (1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burchfield, Joe D., Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, A. G. W., in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 69 (1957)CrossRef
Clerke, Agnes, A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century, 4th ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908).Google Scholar
Clerke, Agnes, Modern Cosmogonies (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905).Google Scholar
DeVorkin, David, “Community and Spectral Classification in Astrophysics: The Acceptance of E. C. Pickering’s System in 1910,” Isis, 72 (1981).Google Scholar
DeVorkin, David, “Stellar Evolution and the Origin of the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram,” in Astrophysics and Twentieth-Century Astronomy to 1950, ed. Gingerich, Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar
DeVorkin, David H., Henry Norris Russell: Dean of American Astronomers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, The Internal Constitution of the Stars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926).Google Scholar
Hearnshaw, J. B., The Analysis of Starlight: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Astronomical Spectroscopy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Herschel, John, A Treatise on Astronomy (London: Longman, Reese, et al., 1833)Google Scholar
Hufbauer, Karl, Exploring the Sun: Solar Science Since Galileo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Langren, Michael, is shown in Hoskin, Michael, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
Mack, Pamela E., “Straying from Their Orbits: Women in Astronomy in America,” in Women of Science: Righting the Record, ed. Kass-Simon, G. and Farnes, Patricia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Meadows, A. J., Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).Google Scholar
Numbers, Ronald L., Creation by Natural Law: Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977).Google Scholar
Paul, Erich Robert, The Milky Way Galaxy and Statistical Cosmology, 1890–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Payne, Cecilia H., “The Relative Abundances of the Elements,” in Stellar Atmospheres, Harvard Observatory Monograph no. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), chap..Google Scholar
Russell, Henry Norris, “On the Composition of the Sun’s Atmosphere,” Astrophysical Journal, 70 (1929).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saha, Meghnad, “Ionization inthe Solar Chromosphere,” Philosophical Magazine, 40 (1920).Google Scholar
Slavings, Ricky L., American Astronomy: Community, Careers, and Power, 1859–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Strömgren, Bengt, “The Opacity of Stellar Matter and the Hydrogen Content of the Stars,” Zeitschrift für Physik, 4 (1932).Google Scholar
Vorkin, David and Kenat, Ralph, “Quantum Physics and the Stars (I), (II),” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 15 (1983).Google Scholar
Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich, “Element Transformation Inside Stars, ii,” Physikalische Zeitschrift, 39 (1938).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×