Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers discovers and names the asteroid Pallas on March 28, 1802.

Born in Arbergen, today part of Bremen, Olbers had studied to be a physician at Göttingen from 1777to 1780.

While at Göttingen, he had studied mathematics with Abraham Gotthelf Kästner.

In 1779, while attending to a sick fellow student, he devised a method of calculating cometary orbits which made an epoch in the treatment of the subject; this was the first satisfactory method of calculating cometary orbits.

After his graduation in 1780, he began practicing medicine in Bremen.

At night he dedicates his time to astronomical observation, making the upper story of his home into an observatory.

Heinrich Olbers had discovered Pallas in 1802, the year after the discovery of Ceres.

He had proposed that the two objects were the remnants of a destroyed planet.

He sent a letter with his proposal to the English astronomer William Herschel, suggesting that a search near the locations where the orbits of Ceres and Pallas intersected might reveal more fragments.

These orbital intersections are located in the constellations of Cetus and Virgo.

Olbers had commenced his search in 1802, and on 29 March 1807 he discovers Vesta in the constellation Virgo—a coincidence, because Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta are not fragments of a larger body.

Because the asteroid Juno had been discovered in 1804, this makes Vesta the fourth object to be identified in the region that is now known as the asteroid belt.

The discovery i announced in a letter addressed to German astronomer Johann H. Schröter dated March 31.

Because Olbers already has credit for discovering a planet (Pallas; at this time, the asteroids are considered to be planets), he gives the honor of naming his new discovery to German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose orbital calculations had enabled astronomers to confirm the existence of Ceres, the first asteroid, and who had computed the orbit of the new planet in the remarkably short time of ten hours.

Gauss decides on the Roman virgin goddess of home and hearth, Vesta.

The Great Comet of 1811 is discovered by Honoré Flaugergues on March 25, 1811.

After being obscured for several days by moonlight, it is also found by Jean-Louis Pons on April 11, while Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach is able to confirm Flaugergues' discovery the same night.

The first provisional orbit is computed in June by Johann Karl Burckhardt.

Based on these calculations, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers makes a prediction that the comet will go on to become extremely bright later this year.

Formally designated C/1811 F1, the Great Comet of 2011 is visible to the naked eye for around two hundred and sixty days, a record it will hold until the appearance of Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997.

In October 1811, at its brightest, it displays an apparent magnitude of 0, with an easily visible coma.

Olbers' paradox, described by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers and also known as the "dark night sky paradox", is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.

The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model.

In the hypothetical case that the universe is static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, then any line of sight from Earth must end at the (very bright) surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright.

This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night.