born July 22, 1784, Minden, Brandenburg
died March 17, 1846, Königsberg, Prussia
German astronomer.
He was the first to measure (by means of parallax ) the distance to a star other than the Sun. One of his major discoveries was that the bright stars Sirius and Procyon make tiny motions explainable only by the existence of invisible companions disturbing their motions. His observation of tiny irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, which he concluded were caused by an unknown planet beyond, led to the discovery of Neptune. His mathematical functions for studying planetary motions became widely used in solving a wide range of differential equations.
Bessel, engraving by E. Mandel after a painting by Franz Wolf
The Bettmann Archive