William Herschel

Biography

Born in Hanover. He moved to England, first working as a musician (organist, conductor). He became interested in astronomy, grinding mirrors for telescopes himself, and became the King's Astronomer. His sister Caroline Herschel was a faithful assistant and herself became a renowned astronomer.

Key discoveries

• Discovery of Uranus (1781) — for the first time since antiquity, discovered a new planet, doubling the boundaries of the solar system.
• Infrared radiation — by measuring the temperature of different parts of the solar spectrum beyond the red limit, he discovered invisible "heat rays", later called infrared.
• Surveys of double stars — proved that many of them are physically bound pairs, and began measurements of their orbits.
• Structure of the Milky Way — proposed a model of our Galaxy as a disk, in which the Sun is not at the center.
• Deep sky catalogs — together with his sister compiled the largest catalogs of nebulae and star clusters, many of which are known today as Herschel objects.