Doppler and Vogel – two great pioneers in astronomy
This article discusses two classical papers in the history of astronomy, namely Christian Doppler’s (1803–53) announcement in May 1842 of the effect named after him, and a major article by Hermann Carl Vogel (1841–1907), which appeared in May 1892. Vogel’s work represented the first successful application of the Doppler effect to stars, to determine their space velocities in the line of sight.
Doppler’s theoretical paper and Vogel’s painstaking instrumental technique have together provided the basis for our knowledge not only of stellar motions, but have also indirectly contributed to our knowledge of stellar rotation, of thermal and turbulent Doppler line broadening in stellar (and other) spectra, of stellar masses in many binary stars, of galaxy masses from their rotation or velocity dispersion, of the missing mass problem in galaxies and clusters, of the expansion of the universe, of the nature of quasi-stellar objects and of the existence of the Big Bang. Indeed astronomical knowledge would almost certainly be vastly poorer if Doppler’s principle had never been applied in astronomy.
