In my last article I dwelt upon Edwin Hubble briefly — briefly I say because I (and other astronomers) can never tire of talking about this man all our life. The same is true for Galileo Galilee, or Issac Newton, or Hawking, or Einstein, or, going back a little, William Herschel, whether or not the occasion presents itself. Many others are equally deserving of the accolade but these men/women are not perhaps as versatile — or academic as the ones enumerated above. So, hats off to them.

The classic topic of the Big Bang would perhaps not have assumed the universal eminence that it did soon after it was coined by the great but, in view of many, an eccentric, Sir Frederick (Fred) Hoyle, (1901-1986) but for the work of Hubble. True Sir Fred did some monumental and earth-shaking work on astronomy, but his floral work also lent itself to many lasting controversies too. For instance, despite naming it, he never believed in the Big Bang theory and remained its vocal opponent to his dying day. Hoyle was instead the adherent of the Steady State theory, which holds that the universe was always there and will always be there, in the same (i.e. steady) state unchanging, except that new stars will come into being and old ones disappear, each having lived it’s life.

In due course of time we shall have more to say about it. Also, he suggested that life came to the Earth from outer space; so did the ailments and diseases and many scourges of the past centuries/millennia. Queer, but interesting nevertheless.

Everything should be made as simple as possible ... but not more so.— Albert Einstein.

Hydrogen did grab our attention but not quite enough. The lightest gas is also the most abundant in the universe by far. Surprisingly, on our planet it is found in traces only except in combination with oxygen in the form of water. Hydrogen and helium play a very small part on the Earth in their natural state, so that if these gases were in even smaller quantity than they are now, it wouldn’t matter at all. But on big, gaseous planets — and all stars besides — these gases play a vital part. We’ll come to grips with them by and by, but let us first continue where we left off the last time around.

Wilhelm Herschel (1738-1822): A German by birth and family connection, (hence the spelling of his first name), he was born in Hanover. A discoverer of galaxies (above all Sombrero Galaxy, named after the popular Mexican hat for it resembles the unique hat), hundreds of double stars, moons, asteroids and nebulae, Herschel will be remembered as one of the greatest astronomers of the modern age (post the Galileo-Newton period prior to him).

Let us also remember that he was not a trained astronomer or observer of skies, but a self-taught astronomer who rose to the dizzying heights of being a royal astronomer of great repute and consequence in the court of King George lII. At the time he migrated to England (1759), he had no idea that astronomy would capture his imagination. Like his father, Herschel belonged to a military band and was an organist and had a reasonably bright career ahead of him as a musician. But such is the spell of astronomy that Herschel was infatuated by it irretrievably.

William (now he became William from Wilhelm!) Herschel’s sister Caroline (1750-1848) soon joined her brother and did commendable work as an astronomer and his helper.

She worked as his assistant until his death, although there were some years that she split from him as a result of acrimony that arose from his marriage to a divorcee. Caroline discovered many moons, asteroids and a comet or two.

Herschel will forever be remembered, besides numerous items of deep space, for four moons of the Planet Uranus — Oberon, Titania, Enceladus and Mimas — besides the seventh planet, Uranus (the moons between 1787 and 1789 — the year of the French Revolution, and the planet in 1781.)

Herschel built for himself a great, 40-foot-long telescope, the largest in the world then. But it proved too big and unwieldy so that most of his discoveries were made on a smaller one which measured about half in size to the previous one.

His death, in 1822, was widely mourned. The stone on his grave — the epitaph — aptly tells the tale:

“He broke through the barriers of the heavens.”

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 17th, 2016