Gambart Adolphe

Originally intended for a career in the Navy by his father, a navigation professor in Sète, France, he met the astronomer Alexis Bouvard (1767-1843) in Le Havre in 1814. Recognizing his gifts, Bouvard took Gambart with him to the Paris Observatory, housed him and introduced him to astronomy. The Board of Longitudes sent him to the Marseilles observatory in 1819 as an assistant astronomer. He became the director in 1823, only 23 years old. The observatory was then equipped with downgraded instruments coming from Paris, but nevertheless sufficient for many jobs. They allowed Gambart to discover 13 comets between 1822 and 1833, whose orbits he calculated himself (he was unrivaled for these calculations). One of them was discovered in Austria by Wilhelm von Biela (1782-1856) 10 days before Gambart, but nationalism pushed Arago to designate it improperly as Gambart’s comet: it was comet 3D/Biela, which was to be split in two halves in 1846. It is nevertheless acknowledged that it is Gambart who showed that it was periodic, the third such comet then known after 1P/Halley and 2P/Encke. He died prematurely of tuberculosis, after fleeing cholera that had struck his family but had spared him.