Johannes was born in
Resterhafe (
East Friesland). He studied at the
University of Helmstedt,
Wittenberg University and graduated from
Leiden University in 1611.[4] He returned from university in the
Netherlands with telescopes that he and his father turned on the
Sun. Despite the difficulties of observing the Sun directly, they noted the existence of
sunspots, the first confirmed instance of their observation (though unclear statements in
East Asian annals suggest that
Chinese and Korean astronomers may have discovered them with the naked eye previously, and Fabricius may have noticed them himself without a telescope a few years before). Johannes first observed a sunspot on February 27, 1611; in
Wittenberg in that year he published the results of his observations in his 22-page pamphlet De Maculis in Sole observatis.....[5] It was the first publication on the topic of sunspots.[6]
The pair soon used
camera obscura telescopy so as to save their eyes and get a better view of the solar disk, and observed that the spots moved. They would appear on the eastern edge of the disk, steadily move to the western edge, disappear, then reappear at the east again after the same amount of time that it had taken for it to cross the disk in the first place.[7]
He is also mentioned in
Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon as someone who claimed to have seen lunar inhabitants through his telescope, though that particular fact is merely part of Verne's fiction. The large (90-kilometre or 56-mile)
Fabricius crater, on the
Moon's southern hemisphere, is named after his father,
David Fabricius.
^Wilfried Schroeder has published the paper by Fabricius on the discovery of sunspots in 1611 in: Wilfried Schroeder, The Discovery of Sunspots, Bremen 2009.
References
Gerhard Berthold: Der Magister Johann Fabricius und die Sonnenflecken, nebst einem Excurs über David Fabricius (Magister Johann Fabricius and Sunspots, together with a Digression on David Fabricius), Leipzig, 1894.
L. Häpke: "Fabricius und die Entdeckung der Sonnenflecken" ("Fabricius and the Discovery of Sunspots") in: Abhandlungen des naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins zu Bremen, 10, 1888, pp. 249–272.
Bernhard Bunte: "Über Johannes Fabricus, den Entdecker der Sonnenflecken" ("On Johannes Fabricius, the Discoverer of Sunspots") in: Jahrbuch der Ges. für bildende Kunst und vaterländ. Altertümer zu Emden, 9, H. 1, 1890, pp. 59–77.
Diedrich Wattenberg: David Fabricius. Der Astronom Ostfrieslands (David Fabricius. Astronomer of
East Friesland), Berlin 1964.
Fritz Krafft: in
Walther Killy's Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache (Literature-Lexicon: Authors and Words of German Language), 15 volumes, Gütersloh; München: Bertelsmann-Lexikon-Verl. 1988-1991 (CD-ROM Berlin 1998
ISBN3-932544-13-7), Vol. 3.
Wilfried Schroeder, The Discovery of Sunspots, Bremen 2009