The bicentennial of the Royal Astronomical Society

Originally planned for 1920, the centenary festivities for the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) had to be delayed until 1922 owing to the repercussions of World War I. Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, the RAS’s bicentennial celebration met a similar fate.

The Astronomical Society of London was born out of a London dinner party in 1820, when 14 men met to discuss their concerns about the future of astronomy. The meeting led to the formation of a member-run organization focused on accurate astronomical observation and calculation as well as practical applications like navigation. A royal charter in 1831 renamed it the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the early 19th century, there were very few professional astronomers. Most members of the young society were keen amateurs with the financial means to pursue their passion. From the start, the society facilitated the publication of astronomical research, in Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society (published 1822–1978) and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), which has been published since 1827.

In the more than 200 years since its founding, the RAS and its expanding membership—now more than 4500 worldwide—have been at the center of professional scientific discourse and amateur inquiry in astronomy and the emergent field of geophysics. No more than once a year, the RAS awards one Gold Medal in astronomy and, since 1903, one in geophysics, honoring specific pieces of exemplary research or recognizing a lifetime’s contribution to research, education, and scientific administration. The Gold Medals are the highest awards bestowed by the society, and the organization’s bylaws grant the RAS Council complete freedom to determine the winners. The record of Gold Medal awards indicates what the RAS considers to be significant contributions to the fields of astronomy and geophysics.

The run-up to bicentenary celebrations began in 2014 with a collaborative outreach project known as RAS200, aimed at expanding public engagement with astronomy and geophysics. The society had planned to launch a redesigned logo in 2020 and to celebrate with banners in Burlington House, its London headquarters. RAS president Mike Edmunds, executive director Philip Diamond, librarian Siân Prosser, and education/outreach officer Lucinda Offer worked to tell a visual story based on the detailed history of the society that had been written for the RAS centenary.

Because of the pandemic, the bicentenary banner plans pivoted to an electronic format, available on the RAS website and on Instagram . The celebratory banners were recently unveiled at the RAS offices, marking the 200th anniversary two years late, but a tidy hundred years after the centenary celebration.

Select items from the RAS timeline have been extracted here and organized in themes to highlight major developments throughout the history of the society.

RAS expeditions

The British empire expanded throughout the 19th century by establishing colonies around the world. As the empire grew, it developed an elaborate administrative system to consolidate its power abroad. What began as a small part of the Home Office had, by the 1850s, emerged as the Colonial Office. The expanding department was central to organizing state support of scientific expeditions that were seen as crucial to the ongoing imperial project (see the commentary by Suman Seth, Physics Today, December 2022, page 10 ).

From 1834 to 1838, three-time RAS president John Herschel made extensive telescopic observations from his base in Cape Town, South Africa. His results from the Southern Hemisphere complemented his father William’s observations of the Northern Hemisphere. John also developed photographic techniques that improved applications to astronomy.

The new technologies of photography and spectroscopy were central to 19th-century eclipse expeditions. Total solar eclipses were viewed as prime opportunities to search for a hypothetical intramercurial planet known as Vulcan, which had been proposed to explain observed discrepancies in Mercury’s orbit. Timing eclipse phases was also great practice for extracting the most scientific value from the rarer transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882.

Starting in 1870, the RAS and the Royal Society began working together to organize state-funded solar eclipse expeditions. At the Madras Observatory in India, Chintamanny Ragoonatha Chary and Isis Pogson were central to observations of the corona during total solar eclipses in 1868 and 1871. Chary became the first Indian fellow of the RAS in 1872; Pogson, however, was denied RAS fellowship in 1886 on account of her gender.

In preparation for the transit of Venus, Chary wrote a book that was published in English as well as Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam, and Marathi. Australian astronomer Henry Chamberlain Russell organized four expeditions throughout New South Wales to observe the transit. He submitted his report and many of his observations to the RAS; overall, however, the results from both Venus transits were disappointing.

In 1894 the RAS formalized with the Royal Society the Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee, which planned and organized support for expeditions to view eclipse totality across the empire into the 20th century. In his 1915 general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that light would bend twice as much as forecast by Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation when passing a large mass. Four years later, Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington led the most well-known solar eclipse expeditions to test the theory (see the article by Daniel Kennefick, Physics Today, March 2009, page 37 ). Later in 1919, at a joint meeting of the RAS and the Royal Society, Einstein’s general relativity was announced as the best theory of gravitation. Einstein, Eddington, and Dyson were later awarded Gold Medals—Einstein and Eddington in astronomy and Dyson in geophysics.

The last quarter of the 20th century brought numerous joint ventures involving the RAS. UK astronomers collaborated with colleagues in the US and the Netherlands on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which launched in 1983. The International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite was launched in 1978 as a joint mission of the UK, NASA, and the newly established European Space Agency (ESA). This mission dramatically exceeded expectations: Planned for three years, it continued until 1996.

RAS involvement with expeditions continued into the 21st century. John Zarnecki, who would later serve as RAS president (2016–18), led an instrument team for the ESA Huygens probe, which landed on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005 and found an icy surface with lakes of methane fed by hydrocarbon rain. The RAS awarded Zarnecki a Gold Medal in 2014 for distinguished service to the ESA and the UK Space Agency.

Geophysics

Although the RAS began with a focus on astronomical observation, the Earth sciences also interested fellows from the start. In 1820 the RAS elected as its first associate member the French geophysicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, who had participated in the first efforts to measure Earth’s magnetic field from a hot air balloon.

More than a century later, in 1922, the RAS published its first geophysics supplement to the MNRAS, reflecting the emergence of the field. Although it would be 1997 before the society’s publication was formally renamed Astronomy and Geophysics to reflect RAS commitment to both terrestrial and celestial physics, the 20th century witnessed growing interest in geophysical science.

In 1931 Vincenzo Consolato Antonio Ferraro became an RAS fellow after publishing the first paper describing Earth’s magnetosphere. Inge Lehmann, a Danish geophysicist and seismologist, was elected as a fellow in 1936, the year she determined that Earth has a solid inner core and a molten outer core rather than being molten all the way through. Harold Jeffreys earned a Gold Medal in 1937 for his work on geophysics and on the origin and age of the solar system, and in 1941 Sydney Chapman became the first geophysicist elected RAS president. Eight years later he was awarded the geophysics Gold Medal for his work on geomagnetic phenomena.

The International Geophysical Year in 1958 launched a global program of data collection that elevated worldwide interest in geophysical research (see the article by Fae Korsmo, Physics Today, July 2007, page 38 ). That same year, the RAS responded to the growing interest with a new publication, the Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Since 1989 the journal has been known as Geophysical Journal International, published monthly by Oxford University Press on behalf of the RAS and the German Geophysical Society.

The advent of the World-Wide Standardized Seismograph Network in 1964 established a network of identical seismometers to pinpoint the location of earthquakes and to facilitate the detection of underground nuclear test explosions. Nearly a decade later, in 1973, the first RAS Chapman Medal for geophysics and planetary science went to the marine geologists and geophysicists Drummond Matthews and Fred Vine for their work on seafloor spreading, related to plate tectonics on Earth’s surface.

In 1980 the Joint Association for Geophysics emerged from the RAS and the Geological Society, both of which had a long history of supporting work on earthquakes, gravitation, and magnetic fields. The organization was renamed the British Geophysical Association in 1997.

In 2015 the RAS sent evidence on the risk of adverse space weather to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which resulted in the development of a UK strategy for space weather. More than 150 years earlier, in 1859, MNRAS had published Richard Carrington’s report on the largest recorded geomagnetic storm, which generated electrical sparking across Victorian telegraph poles. A similarly powerful solar flare reaching Earth today would likely cause trillions of dollars of damage by interfering with satellite technology, aviation, and mobile communications.

New frontiers

Since the founding of the RAS, its members have contributed to the development of observational astronomy techniques. Astronomers in the 19th century focused on tools of photography and spectroscopy. The 20th century brought powerful instruments for observing wavelengths beyond visible light. Particularly since the 20th century, the RAS has also been central to the testing, discussion, and dissemination of revolutionary new ideas.

William Cranch Bond, the first American member of the RAS, made one of the first daguerreotypes of the Moon, in 1849. The achievement demonstrated the central role of astronomers in the development of photography, a role that was reinforced later in the 19th century when solar eclipse expeditions provided opportunities to test and advance photographic technology.

In 1887 eight RAS Council members attended an international astrophotographic conference in Paris. The RAS then established a dedicated Photographic Committee, acknowledging that stars could be observed as “fields” in increasing depth and detail.

Eddington, who served as RAS president from 1921 to 1923, published The Internal Constitution of the Stars (1920), an instant hit that remained a bestseller for decades. In 1931 he arranged for a translation of Georges Lemaître’s 1927 paper on the expansion of the universe. That version was republished in MNRAS, which dramatically expanded the circulation of ideas that later led to the conception of the Big Bang. In Edinburgh in 1948, at the first RAS meeting outside London, “The Steady State Theory of the Expanding Universe,” a paper presented by Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold, sparked what would be a generation of debate.

At an RAS meeting in 1935, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used quantum mechanics to predict the existence of stars made from extremely dense matter (see the article by Kameshwar Wali, Physics Today, October 1982, page 33 ).

In 1949 the Radio Astronomy Committee set up a 250-foot steerable paraboloid aerial at the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station. Bernard Lovell used the Jodrell Bank Mk1 telescope fitted with a transmitter to track the casing of the rocket that launched the first Sputnik satellite in 1957. The telescope also received the first-ever pictures from the surface of the Moon, sent by the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in 1966.

Another triumph for radio astronomy occurred in 1967, when Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered rotating neutron stars called pulsars. In subsequent years, several prize-awarding bodies validated further pioneering research in radio astrophysics. The first RAS Herschel Medal for investigations of outstanding merit in observational astrophysics went to Paul Wild in 1974 for his work on radio emissions from the Sun.

That same year, for the first time ever, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to observational astronomers, Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish. Ryle was recognized for his invention of the aperture synthesis technique and Hewish, Bell Burnell’s doctoral adviser, for his role in the pulsar discovery. The RAS had recognized the significance of those advances in the decade prior through prizes awarded to Ryle and Hewish.

A parallel story played out with the early study of exoplanets, with the RAS anticipating a Nobel Prize decision. In 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz used a state-of-the-art spectrometer to detect cyclic movements of the star 51 Pegasi that indicated an orbiting planet—the first exoplanet detected around a normal star. The RAS recognized Mayor’s work with a Gold Medal in 2015; in 2019 he and Queloz were jointly awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The idea that there was invisible dark matter in the universe had first been articulated by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, based on observations of the velocity of galaxies. Decades later, Vera Rubin’s observations of large-scale movements of galaxies provided evidence for the existence of dark matter (see the article by Rubin, Physics Today, December 2006, page 8 ). The outer stars in spiral galaxies were supposed to move more slowly than central stars, owing to less visible mass in outer parts of the galaxies. Rubin observed that velocities of outer stars in spiral galaxies were not lower, and thus concluded there existed invisible mass in those galaxies. The RAS recognized Rubin’s pioneering work with a Gold Medal in 1996.

Recent RAS activity has involved the observation of both gravitational waves and x rays to address questions at the forefront of astronomy. The RAS annual meeting in 2016 celebrated the first detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory consortium. In 2020 Andrew Fabian (RAS president, 2008–10) won the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for his work using x rays to understand how supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies interact with stars and gas around them.

Women in the RAS

The RAS did not permit women to be fellows for about 100 years. Nonetheless, throughout the 19th century, women participated in the observations and calculations that were central to the interests of the society.

Caroline Herschel, the sister of William, discovered her first comet in 1786 and was granted a small salary from King George III the following year. By 1798 she had discovered eight comets, submitted to the Royal Society a list of more than 500 stars missing from Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, and completed a catalog of 2500 nebulae. In 1828 the RAS awarded her a Gold Medal for her work on comets and nebulae; it was the first RAS prize given to a woman.

In 1835 Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville were the first women to be elected honorary members of the RAS. It would be 27 years before another woman, Anne Sheepshanks, would receive the same honor. She was recognized for donating to the RAS a collection of telescopes and instruments that had belonged to her brother, Richard Sheepshanks, a noted editor of MNRAS. In 1903 Agnes Mary Clerke, a historian of astronomy, and Margaret Huggins, a pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy, also became honorary members of the RAS.

Proper fellowship was denied to women because of the RAS royal charter’s exclusive use of the pronoun he in reference to RAS fellows. This is why Isis Pogson was declined a fellowship in 1886 after being nominated by her father, Norman Robert Pogson, an astronomer at the Madras Observatory. In 1892 Elizabeth Brown, Alice Everett, and Annie Russell were likewise rejected as fellows.

Due partly to the RAS exclusion, the British Astronomical Association (BAA) started in 1890 to support amateur astronomers and, particularly, to include female astronomers. Brown served as director of the solar section and was one of the 48 members of the original governing council. Everett, the first woman to be paid for astronomical work at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, was also a founding BAA member. Russell joined her there in 1891 as one of the few female computers.

Not until 1915 did the RAS Council petition the king to supplement the charter to allow women to be elected as fellows and associates. In 1916 RAS bylaws were amended so that “words denoting the masculine gender only shall include the feminine gender also.” That year 11 women were elected fellows. Among them was Annie Russell (by then Annie Maunder), credited for her work on sunspots and for excellence in solar photography.

Solar astronomer Madge Adam, who in 1938 was named an RAS fellow, became the first woman on the RAS Council six years later, adding to her list of firsts: No woman before her had earned a first in physics at Oxford, and she was the first postgraduate student in solar physics at the University of Oxford observatory. She served as RAS vice president three times: 1947–48, 1961–63, and 1969–70.

In 1949 Flora Munro McBain became the first woman appointed secretary of the RAS, following her tenure as the first dedicated editor of MNRAS in 1948. Nearly a half-century later, in 1994, solar physicist Carole Jordan became the first woman president of the RAS. Since then, Bell Burnell (2002–04), Kathryn Whaler (2004–06), and Emma Bunce (2020–22) have also led the society.

In addition to taking governance roles, women fellows of the RAS have also made notable scientific contributions, including Bell Burnell’s pulsar discovery and Rubin’s observations providing evidence of dark matter. In 2005 Jordan won the RAS Gold Medal in geophysics for her groundbreaking work in stellar astrophysics. That same year, Margaret Burbidge shared the Gold Medal in astronomy with Geoffrey Burbidge for their joint contributions to astronomical research and impressive record of service. Prior to 2005, Caroline Herschel and Rubin had been the only women to win an RAS Gold Medal.

In 1988 the RAS began tracking the makeup of the astronomy and geophysics community in the UK. The latest survey, completed in 2021, showed that 19% of RAS fellows were women. However, an RAS membership survey in 2014 showed that 37% of fellows under age 40 identified as women.

Deborah Kent is a reader in the history of mathematics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her research focuses on 19th-century mathematical sciences and has included work on the Neptune controversy and historical eclipse expeditions . She would like to thank Robert Massey, Annie Hogan, Mike Edmunds, Siân Prosser, and John Zarnecki.