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John Pringle Nichol (1804–59) was a Scottish polymath whose major interests were economics and astronomy; he did much to popularise the latter by his writings. He became Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow in 1836, and in the following year published Views of the Architecture of the Heavens which was immediately successful. George Eliot wrote in a letter of 1841, 'I have been revelling in Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System, and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system, and from universe to universe ...' Nichol was a supporter of the nebular hypothesis – that stars form in massive and dense clouds of molecular hydrogen which are gravitationally unstable, and coalesce to smaller denser clumps, which then collapse and form stars – which in modified form is the model most widely accepted today.
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