Dyson, Sir Frank

Sir Frank Dyson, in full Sir Frank Watson Dyson, (born January 8, 1868, Measham, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, England—died May 25, 1939, at sea, en route from Australia to England), British astronomer who in 1919 organized observations of stars seen near the Sun during a solar eclipse, which provided evidence supporting Einstein’s prediction in the theory of general relativity of the bending of light in a gravitational field.

In 1894 Dyson became chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and was a member of eclipse expeditions to Portugal (1900), Sumatra (1901), and Tunisia (1905). His observations of the corona and chromosphere of the Sun were published in Determination of Wave-Lengths from Spectra Obtained at the Total Solar Eclipses of 1900, 1901, and 1905 (1906). Dyson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1901, and in 1905 he was appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland. He returned to Greenwich in 1910 to become the ninth Astronomer Royal of England, and five years later he was knighted. In 1921 he was honoured for his investigations of the distribution and movements of stars and the relationship of these to the structure of the Galaxy. Dyson’s Eclipses of the Sun and Moon (1937) was written with British astronomer Richard van der Riet Woolley.