John goodricke biography

John Goodricke FRS (17 September – 20 April ) was an English amateur astronomer.

Goodricke, the British astronomical prodigy of the late eighteenth century whose discoveries laid the foundations of an important branch of stellar astronomy, died at not quite twenty-two years of age. But into this lamentably brief life—and despite the handicap of deafness and dumbness—he managed to compress enough accomplishment to earn a permanent place in the history of science.

He was descended from an old family of English country squires, who, raised to baronetcy by the end of the fifteenth century, were occasionally called upon to perform minor diplomatic services. At the age of eight he was sent from the Netherlands to Edinburgh, to be educated at a school for deaf-mutes which Thomas Braidwood was conducting.

John Goodricke was an English astronomer who was the first to notice that some variable stars (stars whose observed light varies noticeably in intensity) were periodic.

Absence of school records conceals the early development of young Goodricke; but his progress must have been satisfactory, for in he was able to enter Warrington Academy—then a well-known educational institution in the north of England—which made no special provision for handicapped pupils. For the latter he had undoubtedly to thank William Enfield, an outstanding teacher and a mathematician of some renown.

On 12 November , a few days before the first anniversary of the start of his diary, Goodricke recorded:. I observed it diligently for about an hour—I hardly believed that it changed its brightness because I never heard of any star varying so quickly in its brightness. I thought it might perhaps be owing to an optical illusion, a defect in my eyes, or bad air: but the sequel will show that its change is true and that I was not mistaken….

Goodricke was, however, the first to establish that these light changes were periodic. He continued his observations until the end of the season when Algol could be seen above the horizon at York; and it was not until 12 May that Goodricke communicated through the good offices of Rev. Anthony Shepherd, then Plumian professor of astronomy at Cambridge the results of his observations, in the form of a letter read before the Royal Society on 15 May.

Goodricke did indeed deserve it, for not only did he discover the first known short-period variable star but also established a remarkably accurate estimate of its period. A year later [] he revised this period to 2 days, 20 hours, 49 minutes, 9 seconds—a result on which all subsequent observations had little to improve. Nature had denied much to Goodricke but certainly not the gift of a splendid imagination; seldom in the annals of science has the first conjecture of a discoverer been more accurate.

It was destined to remain a hypothesis until , when the German astronomer Hermann Vogel discovered that Algol is also a spectroscopic binary , whose conjunctions coincide with the minima of light.