.jpg)
Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Arthur Robert Hinks
Arthur Robert Hinks, CBE, FRS (26 May 1873 – 14 April 1945) was a British astronomer and geographer.
As an astronomer, he is best known for his work in determining the distance from the Sun to the Earth (the astronomical unit) from 1900 to 1909: for this achievement, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His later professional career was in surveying and cartography, an extension of his astronomical interests.
Hinks was educated at Whitgift School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1895.
Although Hinks had originally intended to measure stellar parallax, and produced an ambitious plan to do so in conjunction with Henry Norris Russell, an even more fundamental opportunity arose with the discovery in 1898 of 433 Eros. It soon became apparent that Eros was a near-Earth asteroid, and would be passing very close to the Earth in late 1900 – early 1901. The closest approach was about 30 million miles (48 million kilometres), or about 125 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, a stone's-throw in astronomical terms. With Eros passing so close to the Earth, it would be possible to measure its parallax to high precision, and so calculate the solar parallax or, in other terms, the distance from the Sun to the Earth (now known as the astronomical unit, a name that was coined at about this time).
An international effort to obtain accurate observations of Eros was put in place under the co-ordination of Maurice Loewy, then director of the Paris Observatory. Hinks was an enthusiastic, even zealous member of the team from the start, and was responsible for the observations from Cambridge Observatory. In total, no fewer than fifty-eight observatories were involved. Hinks spent three months observing Eros from dusk until dawn in 1900/01 – or rather, trying to observe Eros: the weather in Cambridge was unusually wet that winter, and Hinks only had half a dozen cloud-free nights during the whole period. Fortunately he was using a photographic telescope, and was able to obtain some 500 exposures, as results from more traditional visual methods (meridian line or micrometre measurements) would have been far less conclusive.
Hinks published the Cambridge results in November 1901, but this was far from the end of the task. The results from all the participating observatories had to be collated and analysed, a monumental feat which initially fell to Loewy in Paris. An additional problem was that it was not clear how the different measurement uncertainties should be treated, especially as different observatories used different methods to calculate the apparent position of Eros. Hinks also participated in this initial period, publishing a comparison of his Cambridge results with those from the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, California, and from the Goodsell Observatory near Minneapolis, Minnesota. However Hinks became increasingly concerned about the systematic errors in several of the results, and published his own provisional result for the solar parallax in 1904, based on photographic observations from nine observatories.
Hinks continued to work on the problem as secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, a post he held from 1903 to 1913 – he admitted himself that solar parallax work took up most of his time at the Cambridge Observatory, although he did publish other papers. When Loewy died suddenly in 1907 (aged 74), Hinks appears to have taken over the final reduction of the data. The final result was published in 1909: the solar parallax was 8.807 ± 0.0027 arcseconds, slightly larger than the 8.80 arcseconds that Newcomb had calculated and that had been internationally accepted since 1896.
A bonus result was that Hinks was also able to calculate the ratio between the mass of the Earth and the mass of the Moon as 81.53 ± 0.047.
Hub AI
Arthur Robert Hinks AI simulator
(@Arthur Robert Hinks_simulator)
Arthur Robert Hinks
Arthur Robert Hinks, CBE, FRS (26 May 1873 – 14 April 1945) was a British astronomer and geographer.
As an astronomer, he is best known for his work in determining the distance from the Sun to the Earth (the astronomical unit) from 1900 to 1909: for this achievement, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His later professional career was in surveying and cartography, an extension of his astronomical interests.
Hinks was educated at Whitgift School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1895.
Although Hinks had originally intended to measure stellar parallax, and produced an ambitious plan to do so in conjunction with Henry Norris Russell, an even more fundamental opportunity arose with the discovery in 1898 of 433 Eros. It soon became apparent that Eros was a near-Earth asteroid, and would be passing very close to the Earth in late 1900 – early 1901. The closest approach was about 30 million miles (48 million kilometres), or about 125 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, a stone's-throw in astronomical terms. With Eros passing so close to the Earth, it would be possible to measure its parallax to high precision, and so calculate the solar parallax or, in other terms, the distance from the Sun to the Earth (now known as the astronomical unit, a name that was coined at about this time).
An international effort to obtain accurate observations of Eros was put in place under the co-ordination of Maurice Loewy, then director of the Paris Observatory. Hinks was an enthusiastic, even zealous member of the team from the start, and was responsible for the observations from Cambridge Observatory. In total, no fewer than fifty-eight observatories were involved. Hinks spent three months observing Eros from dusk until dawn in 1900/01 – or rather, trying to observe Eros: the weather in Cambridge was unusually wet that winter, and Hinks only had half a dozen cloud-free nights during the whole period. Fortunately he was using a photographic telescope, and was able to obtain some 500 exposures, as results from more traditional visual methods (meridian line or micrometre measurements) would have been far less conclusive.
Hinks published the Cambridge results in November 1901, but this was far from the end of the task. The results from all the participating observatories had to be collated and analysed, a monumental feat which initially fell to Loewy in Paris. An additional problem was that it was not clear how the different measurement uncertainties should be treated, especially as different observatories used different methods to calculate the apparent position of Eros. Hinks also participated in this initial period, publishing a comparison of his Cambridge results with those from the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, California, and from the Goodsell Observatory near Minneapolis, Minnesota. However Hinks became increasingly concerned about the systematic errors in several of the results, and published his own provisional result for the solar parallax in 1904, based on photographic observations from nine observatories.
Hinks continued to work on the problem as secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, a post he held from 1903 to 1913 – he admitted himself that solar parallax work took up most of his time at the Cambridge Observatory, although he did publish other papers. When Loewy died suddenly in 1907 (aged 74), Hinks appears to have taken over the final reduction of the data. The final result was published in 1909: the solar parallax was 8.807 ± 0.0027 arcseconds, slightly larger than the 8.80 arcseconds that Newcomb had calculated and that had been internationally accepted since 1896.
A bonus result was that Hinks was also able to calculate the ratio between the mass of the Earth and the mass of the Moon as 81.53 ± 0.047.