Oscar Backlund 1846-1916. Image: Virtual Museum of the Tartu observatory.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Johan Backlund
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Oskar Backlund graduated from Uppsala University in 1872 and received his doctorate in 1875.
Career
Gallery of Johan Backlund
Johan Oskar Backlund (28 April 1846 – 29 August 1916) was a Swedish-Russian astronomer.
Gallery of Johan Backlund
Oskar Backlund in 1900s.
Achievements
Membership
the Royal Society of London
1911 - 1916
The Royal Society of London, London, SW1 United Kingdom
Oskar Backlund became a member of the Royal Society in 1911.
Awards
the Bruce Medal
In 1914 Oskar Backlund received the Bruce Gold Medal, which is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy.
the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
In 1909 Oskar Backlund received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1914 Oskar Backlund received the Bruce Gold Medal, which is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy.
Johan Oskar Backlund was a Swedish-Russian astronomer. The main object of Backlund’s research was comet 1786 1, known as Encke’s comet or comet Encke-Backlund. Backlund was the third man after Johann Franz Encke and Friedrich Emil von Asten, who devoted a major portion of his life to studying it, and the first to show that the long-term acceleration in its motion is subject to irregular changes, attributable to nongravitational forces.
Background
Johan Oskar Backlund was born on April 28, 1846 in Länghem, in Västergötland, Sweden. His name is sometimes given as Jöns Oskar Backlund, however even contemporary Swedish sources give "Johan". In Russia, where he spent his entire career, he is known as Oskar Andreevich Baklund.
Education
Bom in poverty, Backlund left school at an early age but nevertheless managed to prepare himself for entrance to the University of Uppsala, where he received a Ph.D. in 1875.
After getting his doctorate in 1875, he emigrated to Russia in 1876. After three years at the observatory of Dorpat, Johan Backlund went to Pulkovo Observatory, located about ten miles south of Petrograd (now Leningrad), to work under Otto von Struve. In 1886 he left Pulkovo for the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Petrograd, to which he had been elected in 1883, but returned in 1895 to serve for the rest of his life as director at Pulkovo. He also traveled throughout Europe and the United States to attend scientific meetings.
Although Backlund favored Encke’s idea that the comet’s accelerated motion was due to a thin interplanetary medium, he nevertheless wanted to make sure no gravitational accelerations had been overlooked. He therefore decided to recalculate all planetary perturbations since 1819, the year Encke first obtained an orbit for the comet. By 1886 Backlund had got the financial backing necessary to carry out this tremendous task and had hired a number of people as computers.
The results, published between 1892 and 1898, were impressive, but the comet continued to depart from predictions based upon them in a way that Backlund was unable to explain, although he considered two different possibilities: first, a patchy stream of meteoroids lying along the inner part of the comet’s orbit, then electrical forces related to the sunspot cycle. Until the advent of electronic computers the efforts of later workers served mainly to confirm Backlund’s suspicion that no single explanation would suffice. Current thinking tends toward the idea, first suggested in 1836 by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, that loss of mass by the comet itself is responsible.
Russian sources sometimes give his dates of birth and death as April 16, 1846 and August 16, 1916, since Russia still used the Julian calendar at the time.
In his religious affiliation Oskar Backlund was an Evangelist.
Membership
Oskar Backlund became a member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1883, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1897 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 1911.
the Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1911 - 1916
Connections
Johann Oskar Backlund was married to Ulrika Catharina Widebeck. Their daughter Elsa Celsing became a well-known artist, and their son Helge Gotrik Backlund (3 September 1878 – 1958) was a geologist and explorer.
In 1914 Oskar Backlund received the Bruce Gold Medal, which is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy.
In 1914 Oskar Backlund received the Bruce Gold Medal, which is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy.