Feb

26

I was not familiar with John Michell (1724–1793) until I read that he did a statistical analysis to show that double stars seen in the night sky were far too numerous to exist by chance and thus must be actual binary star systems. He also essentially posited black holes - in the 18th century!

John Michell

Michell was the first person to apply the new mathematics of statistics to the study of the stars, and demonstrated in a 1767 paper that many more stars occur in pairs or groups than a perfectly random distribution could account for. He focused his investigation on the Pleiades cluster, and calculated that the likelihood of finding such a close grouping of stars was about one in half a million. He concluded that the stars in these double or multiple star systems might be drawn to one another by gravitational pull, thus providing the first evidence for the existence of binary stars and star clusters. His work on double stars may have influenced his friend William Herschel's research on the same topic.


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