Giovanni Schiaparelli

Giovanni Schiaparelli


Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (March 14, 1835 – July 4, 1910) was an Italian astronomer and science historian. He studied at the University of Turin and Berlin Observatory and worked for over forty years at Brera Observatory.
He was also a senator of the Kingdom of Italy, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino and the Regio Istituto Lombardo, and is particularly known for his studies of Mars.
His niece Elsa Schiaparelli became a famed couturiere







Born March 14, 1835(1835-03-14)
Savigliano[1
]
Died July 4, 1910 (aged 75)

Citizenship Italian
Fields astronomer






Mars


Among Schiaparelli's contributions are his telescopic observations of Mars. In his initial observations, he named the"seas" and "continents" of Mars. During Italy's "Great Opposition" of 1877, he observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars which he called "canali" in Italian, meaning "channels" but mistranslated as "canals". While the latter term indicates an artificial construction, the former indicates the connotation that it can also be a natural configuration of the land. From this incorrect translation, various assumptions about life on Mars derived, as the "canals" of Mars soon became famous, giving rise to waves of hypotheses, speculation and folklore about the possibility of life on Mars. Among the most fervent supporters of the artificial canals was the famous American astronomer Percival Lowell who spent much of his life trying to prove the existence of intelligent life on the red planet. Later, however, with notable thanks to the observations of Italian astronomer Vicenzo Cerulli, scientists ascertained that the famous channels were actually mere optical illusions
In his book Life on Mars, Schiaparelli writes: "Rather than true channels in a form familiar to us, we must imagine depressions in the soil that are not very deep, extended in a straight direction for thousands of miles, over a width of 100, 200 kilometers and maybe more. I have already pointed out that, in the absence of rain on Mars, these channels are probably the main mechanism by which the water (and with it organic life) can spread on the dry surface of the planet.
Astronomy

An observer of objects in the solar system, Schiaparelli worked with binary stars, discovered the asteroid 69 Hesperia on April 26, 1861, and demonstrated that the Perseids and Leonids meteor showers were associated with comets. He proved, for example, that the orbit of the Leonids meteor shower coincided with that of the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. These observations led the astronomer to formulate the hypothesis, subsequently proved to be very exact, that the meteor showers could be the trails of comets.


History of Science

Schiaparelli was one of the greatest scholars of his century of the history of classical astronomy. He was the first to realize that the concentric spheres of Eudoxus of Cnidus and Callippus, unlike those used by many astronomers of later times, were not designed as a sphere material, but only as part of an algorithm similar to the modern Fourier series. Ingeniously, he also proposes the reconstruction of Callippus's planetary system, which is still the basis of studies on this topic.




Giovanni Schiaparelli

Giovanni Schiaparelli

Giovanni Schiaparelli


Giovanni Schiaparelli


Giovanni Schiaparelli

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