Which society heard Doppler's 1842 paper on colored starlight?

The story behind the answer

The Royal Bohemian Society heard Doppler’s 1842 paper on colored starlight. The society is more fully known in English as the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, a learned institution based in Prague.

At age 38, Christian Doppler presented his paper, titled “On the Coloured Light of the Binary Stars and Some Other Stars of the Heavens.” He argued that the relative motion of a star and an observer should alter the observed frequency of light, producing changes in apparent color. This was the first published formulation of what became known as the Doppler effect.

Doppler’s original astronomical interpretation was only partly successful: the effect itself was sound, but his attempt to explain the visible colors of binary stars was later shown to be wrong. The paper is also associated with two dates in some references, because a preliminary version appeared in 1842 while the society’s proceedings were published in 1843. The Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences was founded in 1784 and ultimately preceded today’s Czech Academy of Sciences.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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