Arthur Robert Hinks
| Arthur R. Hinks | |
|---|---|
| Born |
26 May 1873 London, UK |
| Died | 14 April 1945 (aged 71) Royston, Hertfordshire, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | astronomy, geography |
| Institutions | Cambridge Observatory |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Known for | measurement of solar parallax |
| Influenced | Henry Norris Russell |
| Notable awards |
Leconte Prize (1910) Victoria Medal (1938) Cullum Geographical Medal (1943) CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society |
Arthur Robert Hinks, CBE, FRS (26 May 1873 – 14 April 1945) was a British astronomer and geographer.
As an astronomer, he is best known for his work in determining the distance from the Sun to the Earth (the astronomical unit) from 1900–1909: for this achievement, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His later professional career was in surveying and cartography, an extension of his astronomical interests.
Hinks was educated at Whitgift School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1892.
Although Hinks had originally intended to measure stellar parallax, and produced an ambitious plan to do so in conjunction with Henry Norris Russell, an even more fundamental opportunity arose with the discovery in 1898 of 433 Eros. It soon became apparent that Eros was a near-Earth asteroid, and would be passing very close to the Earth in late 1900 – early 1901. The closest approach was about 30 million miles (48 million kilometres), or about 125 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, a stone's-throw in astronomical terms. With Eros passing so close to the Earth, it would be possible to measure its parallax to high precision, and so calculate the solar parallax or, in other terms, the distance from the Sun to the Earth (now known as the astronomical unit, a name that was coined at about this time).
An international effort to obtain accurate observations of Eros was put in place under the co-ordination of Maurice Loewy, then director of the Paris Observatory. Hinks was an enthusiastic, even zealous member of the team from the start, and was responsible for the observations from Cambridge Observatory. In total, no fewer than fifty-eight observatories were involved. Hinks spent three months observing Eros from dusk until dawn in 1900/01 – or rather, trying to observe Eros: the weather in Cambridge was unusually wet that winter, and Hinks only had half a dozen cloud-free nights during the whole period. Fortunately he was using a photographic telescope, and was able to obtain some 500 exposures, as results from more traditional visual methods (meridian line or micrometre measurements) would have been far less conclusive.
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