Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers (1758-1840) was a German physician and astronomer from Bremen. He trained in medicine at Göttingen, where in 1779 he devised the first satisfactory method of calculating the orbits of comets, and after graduating in 1780 he practised medicine in Bremen while observing the sky from an observatory he built into the upper floor of his home. In 1800 he was one of 24 astronomers invited to join the group known as the celestial police, which searched for new planets, and he discovered the asteroids Pallas in 1802 and Vesta in 1807, allowing Carl Friedrich Gauss to name Vesta. He also found the periodic comet now designated 13P/Olbers in 1815 and proposed that the asteroid belt was the remnant of a destroyed planet, a view later replaced by the explanation that tidal effects from Jupiter disrupted planet formation there. Olbers's paradox, the argument that the dark night sky conflicts with an infinite, eternal and static universe, is named for him, though others had advanced it too.