Born Paris, France, September 1736
Died Paris, France, 12 November 1793
Jean‐Sylvain Bailly, a French astronomer and politician, was largely known for his contributions to astronomy and his tragic political career. After studying with Nicolas de La Caille and Alexis Clairaut, Bailly computed orbits of various comets and, using Clairaut's theory, made the first effort to improve the tables of the satellites of Jupiter. Such tables were widely used for navigation and surveying purposes at the time. By applying theoretical rather than empirical methods, Bailly attempted to predict the perturbations in their orbits more accurately and thus make the tables more accurate. In 1771, Bailly published his most noteworthy scientific work, a study of the inequalities of light observed in the immersion and emersion of Jupiter's satellites during their eclipse in the Jovian shadow. Using a new observational technique, Bailly related those anomalies to the characteristic amount of light reflected...
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Selected References
Chapin, Seymour L. (1970). “Bailly, Jean‐Sylvain.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Vol. 1, pp. 400–402. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Conner, S. P. (1985). “Bailly, Jean‐Sylvain.” In Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789–1799, edited by Samuel F. Scott and Barry Rothaus, pp. 53–56. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood.
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Oliveira, E. (2007). Bailly, Jean‐Sylvain. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_98
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