Jeremiah horrocks biography

Jeremiah Horrocks (born 1618, Toxteth Park, near Liverpool [now in Merseyside], England—died January 3, 1641, Toxteth Park) was a.
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Jeremiah Horrocks (1618 – 3 January 1641), sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox was an English astronomer.

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Biography

Jeremiah Horrocks' mother was Mary Aspinwall, while his father, who was a farmer, is variously recorded as William Horrocks or James Horrocks. There is some evidence that Horrocks' father came from the Deane district of Bolton, although this is far from certain, but we do know that his mother was from a notable Toxteth Park family. Certainly some members of the family were watchmakers and it is said that a watchmaker brother of Mary Aspinwall first interested Jeremiah in astronomy. We have no certain information concerning the size of the family, although we do know that Jeremiah had a brother named Jonas.

We know nothing of Horrocks' early education, but we do know that he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 11 May 1632. This young age, only thirteen or fourteen, might make us double check the date of his birth. We should explain that we have deduced the year of his birth from the certain knowledge of the date of his death, and a report that he died at the age of 22. Some historians give 1617 and others give 1619 as the year of his birth. However, we should no

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Jeremiah Horrocks

English astronomer (1618–1641)

Jeremiah Horrocks (1618 – 3 January 1641), sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox (the Latinised version that he used on the Emmanuel College register and in his Latin manuscripts),^[2] was an English astronomer.^[3] He was the first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and he was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record. Most remarkably, Horrocks correctly asserted that Jupiter was accelerating in its orbit while Saturn was slowing and interpreted this as due to mutual gravitational interaction, thereby demonstrating that gravity's actions were not limited to the Earth, Sun, and Moon.^[4]

His early death and the chaos of the English Civil War nearly caused the loss to science of his treatise on the transit, Venus in sole visa; but for this and his other work he is acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of British astronomy

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Today, a planetary prodigy. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Jeremiah Horrocks got a new telescope in 1638. That was thirty years after the Dutch had made the first telescope. Horrocks was twenty, and had already been doing astronomy with a more primitive instrument. Now he had a good one and was about to earn his name as the Father of British Astronomy. The catch is, he would also die three years later at the age of only 23.

Like another astronomer, Omar Khayyam, Horrocks was also a poet. And he used poetry to sing his telescope's praises:

Divine the hand which to Urania's power
Triumphant raised the trophy, which on man
Hath first bestowed the wondrous tube by art
Invented, and in noble daring taught
His mortal eyes to scan the furthest heavens.

By then, Horrocks knew Kepler's and Copernicus's work intimately. Galileo had only recently finished his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Horrock