Carrington, Richard Christopher

Richard Christopher Carrington, (born May 26, 1826, London, Eng.—died Nov. 27, 1875, Churt, near Farnham, Surrey), English astronomer who, by observing the motions of sunspots, discovered the equatorial acceleration of the Sun—i.e., that it rotates faster at the equator than near the poles. He also discovered the movement of sunspot zones toward the Sun’s equator as the solar cycle progresses.

The son of a brewer, Carrington was educated at Cambridge and in 1853 established his own observatory at Redhill, Reigate, Surrey. He published A Catalogue of 3,735 Circumpolar Star (1857). In 1859 he noted the coincidence (but did not claim a direct connection) between an intense geomagnetic storm and a solar flare he had observed the day before, thus prefiguring the discipline of space weather research. In 1865 his health failed and he did little work thereafter.