Abstract
THE announcement of the death of Dr. Otto von Struve does more than awaken a profound regret. His name recalls a period of past history, and summons up before us the memory of times when astronomy occupied a different position from that it assumes today, when it had fewer objects of interest wherewith to attract, and offered fewer problems for solution. Fifty-five years have gone since Otto von Struve received at the hands of the late Astronomer Royal the medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his paper on precession and solar motion, and sixty-five since the paper was published. Seeing that Struve was born in 1819, he early came into prominence as an astronomer, and_the value attached to the results and the confidence inspired by the paper are not a little remarkable, for there were some very obvious objections which might have been taken to the conclusions stated, or at least it appears so when viewed from a later standpoint. Accompanying the paper was also a discussion of the amount and direction of the solar motion. Only four years had elapsed since Argelander had published his paper assigning with some precision the place of the solar apex, and thus perhaps settling a doubt which had long divided astronomical thought. Prevost and Klugel had taken one side of the question, and Burck-hardt and Lindenau led the party who were unwilling to accept the evidence. Men's minds were certainly divided as to the possibility of detecting the sun's motion, and Struve's paper came at a fortunate moment and strengthened the evidence produced by Argelander, for, based on very different material, Struve's position scarcely differed two degrees from that assigned by the Abo astronomer. Also, Struve was fairly fortunate in fixing the annual amount of the solar motion at about twice that of the radius of the earth's orbit. Later investigations have shown that a greater velocity is probable, but he was certainly correct in asserting that the linear motion of the sun appeared to be less than that of stars in general.
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Dr. Otto Von Struve . Nature 72, 61 (1905). https://doi.org/10.1038/072061a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/072061a0