Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers
German physician and astronomer (1758-1840) · Germany · Doctors · Died at 81
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Something wrong?He found a tidy way to map comet paths, then stumbled on two of the first asteroids ever spotted - chunks of rock that rewrote what the solar system looked like.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers
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Fernrohr Olbers (Focke Museum)
Focke-Museum Bremen Inv A-0671--02
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Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840)
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Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, Pastellgemälde von Johann Christian August Schwartz, 1805Awards
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Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers was a German astronomer born on 11 October 1758. He devised a convenient method for calculating the orbits of comets, work that made tracking those icy wanderers less of a guessing game. In 1802 he discovered Pallas, the second asteroid known to science, and five years later, in 1807, he found Vesta, the fourth. Both discoveries arrived at a moment when the space between Mars and Jupiter was revealing itself to be far more crowded than anyone had imagined. He died on 2 March 1840.
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