Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies Part 3

The remarkably accurate instruments devised by Tycho Brahe and employed by him in improving the observations of the positions of the heavenly bodies were no doubt built after descriptions of astrolabes such as Hipparchus used, as described by Ptolemy. In his "Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica" we find ill.u.s.trations and descriptions of many of them.

One is a polar astrolabe, mounted somewhat as a modern equatorial telescope is, and the meridian circle is adjustable so that it can be used in any place, no matter what its lat.i.tude might be. There is a graduated equatorial ring at right angles to the polar axis, so that the astrolabe could be used for making observations outside the meridian as well as on it. This equatorial circle slides through grooves, and is furnished with movable sights, and a plumb line from the zenith or highest point of the meridian circle makes it possible to give the necessary adjustment in the vertical. Screws for adjustment at the bottom are provided, just as in our modern instruments, and two observers were necessary, taking their sights simultaneously; unless, as in one type of the instrument, a clock, or some sort of measure of time, was employed.

Another early type of instrument is called by Tycho the ecliptic astrolabe (_Armillae Zodiacales_, or the Zodiacal Rings). It resembles the equatorial astrolabe somewhat, but has a second ring inclined to the equatorial one at an angle equal to the obliquity of the ecliptic. In observing, the equatorial ring was revolved round till the ecliptic ring came into coincidence with the plane of the ecliptic in the sky. Then the observation of a star's longitude and lat.i.tude, as referred to the ecliptic plane, could be made, quite as well as that of right ascension and declination on the equatorial plane. But it was necessary to work quickly, as the adjustment on the ecliptic would soon disappear and have to be renewed.

Tycho is often called the father of the science of astronomical observation, because of the improvements in design and construction of the instruments he used. His largest instrument was a mural quadrant, a quarter-circle of copper, turning parallel to the north-and-south face of a wall, its axis turning on a bearing fixed in the wall. The radius of this quadrant was nine feet, and it was graduated or divided so as to read the very small angle of ten seconds of arc--an extraordinary degree of precision for his day.

Tycho built also a very large alt-azimuth quadrant, of six feet radius.

Its operation was very much as if his mural quadrant could be swung round in azimuth. At several of the great observatories of the present day, as Greenwich and Was.h.i.+ngton, there are instruments of a similar type, but much more accurate, because the mechanical work in bra.s.s and steel is executed by tools that are essentially perfect, and besides this the power of the telescope is superadded to give absolute direction, or pointing on the object under observation.

Excellent clocks are necessary for precise observation with such an instrument; but neither Tycho Brahe, nor Hevelius was provided with such accessories. Hevelius did not avail himself of the telescope as an aid to precision of observation, claiming that pinhole sights gave him more accurate results. It was a dispute concerning this question that Halley was sent over from London to Danzig to arbitrate.

There could be but one way to decide; the telescope with its added power magnifies any displacement of the instrument, and thereby enables the observer to point his instrument more exactly. So he can detect smaller errors and differences of direction than he can without it. And what is of great importance in more modern astronomy, the telescope makes it possible to observe accurately the position of objects so faint that they are wholly invisible to the naked eye.

CHAPTER X

KEPLER, THE GREAT CALCULATOR

Most fortunate it was for the later development of astronomical theory that Tycho Brahe not only was a practical or observational astronomer of the highest order, but that he confined himself studiously for years to observations of the places of the planets. Of Mars he acc.u.mulated an especially long and accurate series, and among those who a.s.sisted him in his work was a young and brilliant pupil named Johann Kepler.

Strongly impressed with the truth of the Copernican System, Kepler was free to reject the erroneous compromise system devised by Tycho Brahe, and soon after Tycho's death Kepler addressed himself seriously to the great problem that no one had ever attempted to solve, viz: to find out what the laws of motion of the planets round the sun really are. Of course he took the fullest advantage of all that Ptolemy and Copernicus had done before him, and he had in addition the splendid observations of Tycho Brahe as a basis to work upon.

Copernicus, while he had effected the tremendous advance of subst.i.tuting the sun for the earth as the center of motion, nevertheless clung to the erroneous notion of Ptolemy that all the bodies of the sky must perforce move at uniform speeds, and in circular curves, the circle being the only "perfect curve." Kepler was not long in finding out that this could not be so, and he found it out because Tycho Brahe's observations were much more accurate than any that Copernicus had employed.

Naturally he attempted the nearest planet first, and that was Mars--the planet that Tycho had a.s.signed to him for research. How fortunate that the orbit of Mars was the one, of all the planets, to show practically the greatest divergence from the ancient conditions of uniform motion in a perfectly circular orbit! Had the orbit of Mars chanced to be as nearly circular as is that of Venus, Kepler might well have been driven to abandon his search for the true curve of planetary motion.

However, the facts of the cosmos were on his side, but the calculations essential in testing his various hypotheses were of the most tedious nature, because logarithms were not yet known in his day. His first discovery was that the orbit of Mars is certainly not a circle, but oval or elliptic in figure. And the sun, he soon found, could not be in the center of the ellipse, so he made a series of trial calculations with the sun located in one of the foci of the ellipse instead.

Then he found he could make his calculated places of Mars agree quite perfectly with Tycho Brahe's observed positions, if only he gave up the other ancient requisite of perfectly uniform motion. On doing this, it soon appeared that Mars, when in perihelion, or nearest the sun, always moved swiftest, while at its greatest distance from the sun, or aphelion, its...o...b..tal velocity was slowest.

Kepler did not busy himself to inquire why these revolutionary discoveries of his were as they were; he simply went on making enough trials on Mars, and then on the other planets in turn, to satisfy himself that all the planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular in form, and are so located in s.p.a.ce that the center of the sun is at one of the two foci of each orbit. This is known as Kepler's first law of planetary motion.

The second one did not come quite so easy; it concerned the variable speed with which the planet moves at every point of the orbit. We must remember how handicapped he was in solving this problem: only the geometry of Euclid to work with, and none of the refinements of the higher mathematics of a later day. But he finally found a very simple relation which represented the velocity of the planet everywhere in its...o...b..t. It was this: if we calculate the area swept, or pa.s.sed over, by the planet's radius vector (that is, the line joining its center to the sun's center) during a week's time near perihelion, and then calculate the similar area for a week near aphelion, or indeed for a week when Mars is in any intermediate part of its...o...b..t, we shall find that these areas are all equal to each other. So Kepler formulated his second great law of planetary motion very simply: the radius vector of any planet describes, or sweeps over, equal areas in equal times. And he found this was true for all the planets.

But the real genius of the great mathematician was shown in the discovery of his third law, which is more complex and even more significant than the other two--a law connecting the distances of the planets from the sun with their periods of revolution about the sun.

This cost Kepler many additional years of close calculation, and the resulting law, his third law of planetary motion is this: The cubes of the mean or average distances of the planets from the sun are proportional to the squares of their times of revolution around him.

So Kepler had not only disposed of the sacred theories of motion of the planets held by the ancients as inviolable, but he had demonstrated the truth of a great law which bound all the bodies of the solar system together. So accurately and completely did these three laws account for all the motions, that the science of astronomy seemed as if finished; and no matter how far in the future a time might be a.s.signed, Kepler's laws provided the means of calculating the planet's position for that epoch as accurately as it would be possible to observe it. Kepler paused here, and he died in 1630.

CHAPTER XI

GALILEO, THE GREAT EXPERIMENTER

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, containing the lives and work of Copernicus, Tycho, Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, Halley, and Newton, were a veritable Golden Age of astronomy. All these men were truly great and original investigators.

None had a career more picturesque and popular than did Galileo. Born a few years earlier and dying a few years later than Kepler, the work of each of these two great astronomers was wholly independent of the other and in entirely different fields. Kepler was discovering the laws of planetary motion, while Galileo was laying the secure foundations of the new science of dynamics, in particular the laws of falling bodies, that was necessary before Kepler's laws could be fully understood. When only eighteen Galileo's keen power of observation led to his discovery of the laws of pendulum motion, suggested by the oscillation to and fro of a lamp in the cathedral of Pisa.

The world-famous leaning tower of this place, where he was born, served as a physical laboratory from the top of which he dropped various objects, and thus was led to formulate the laws of falling bodies. He proved that Aristotle was all wrong in saying that a heavy body must fall swifter in proportion to its weight than a lighter one. These and other discoveries rendered him unpopular with his a.s.sociates, who christened him the "Wrangler."

The new system of Copernicus appealed to him; and when he, first of all men, turned a telescope on the heavenly bodies, there was Venus with phases like those of the moon, and Jupiter with satellites traveling about it--a Copernican system in miniature. Nothing could have happened that would have provided a better demonstration of the truth of the new system and the falsity of the old. His marvelous discoveries caused the greatest excitement--consternation even, among the anti-Copernicans.

Galileo published the "Sidereus Nuncius," with many observations and drawings of the moon, which he showed to be a body not wholly dissimilar to the earth: this, too, was obviously of great moment in corroboration of the Copernican order and in contradiction to the Ptolemaic, which maintained sharp lines of demarcation between things terrestrial and things celestial.

His telescopes, small as they were, revealed to him anomalous appearances on both sides of the planet Saturn which he called _ansae_, or handles. But their subsequent disappearance was unaccountable to him, and later observers, who kept on guessing ineffectively till Huygens, nearly a half century after, showed that the true nature of the appendage was a ring. Spots on the sun were frequently observed by Galileo and led to bitter controversies. He proved, however, that they were objects on the sun itself, not outside it, and by noticing their repeated transits across the sun's disk, he showed that the sun turned round on his axis in a little less than a month--another a.n.a.logy to the like motion of the earth on the Copernican plan.

Galileo's appointment in 1610 as "First Philosopher and Mathematician"

to the Grand Duke of Tuscany gave him abundant time for the pursuit of original investigations and the preparation of books and pamphlets. His first visit to Rome the year following was the occasion of a reception with great honor by many cardinals and others of high rank. His lack of sympathy with others whose views differed from his, and his naturally controversial spirit, had begun to lead him headlong into controversies with the Jesuits and the church, which culminated in his censure by the authorities of the church and persecution by the Inquisition.

In 1618 three comets appeared, and Galileo was again in controversial hot water with the Jesuits. But it led to the publication five years later of "Il Saggiatore" (The a.s.sayer), of no great scientific value, but only a brilliant bit of controversial literature dedicated to the newly elevated Pope, Urban VIII. Later he wrote through several years a great treatise, more or less controversial in character, ent.i.tled a "Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World" between three speakers, and extending through four successive days. Simplicio argues for the Aristotelians, Salviati for the Copernicans, while Sagredo does his best to be neutral. It will always be a very readable book, and we are fortunate to have a recent translation by Professor Crew of Evanston.

Here we find the first suggestion of the modern method of getting stellar parallaxes, the relative parallax, that is, of two stars in the same field--a method not put into service till Bessel's time, two centuries later. But the most important chapters of the "Dialogue" deal with Galileo's investigations of the laws of motion of bodies in general, which he applied to the problem of the earth's motion. In this he really antic.i.p.ated Newton in the first of his three laws of motion, and in a subsequent work, dealing with the theory of projectiles, he reaches substantially the results of Newton's second law of motion, although he gave no general statement of the principle. Nevertheless, in the epoch where his life was lived and his work done, his telescopic discoveries, combined with his dynamic researches in untrodden fields, resulted in the complete and final overthrow of the ancient system of error, and the secure establishment of the Copernican system beyond further question and discussion. Only then could the science of astronomy proceed unhampered to the fullest development by the master minds of succeeding centuries.

CHAPTER XII

AFTER THE GREAT MASTERS

Following Kepler and Galileo was a half century of great astronomical progress along many lines laid out by the work of the great masters. The telescope seemed only a toy, but its improvement in size and quality showed almost inconceivable possibilities of celestial discoveries.

Hevelius of Danzig took up the study of the moon, and his "Selenographia" was finely ill.u.s.trated by plates which he not only drew but engraved himself. Lunar names of mountains, plains, and craters we owe very largely to him. Also he published among other works two on comets, the second of which was published in 1668 and called the "Cometographia," the first detailed account of all the comets observed and recorded to date.

Many were the telescopes turned on the planet Saturn, and every variety of guess was made as to the actual shape and physical nature of the weird appendages discovered by Galileo. The true solution was finally reached by Huygens, whose mechanical genius had enabled him to grind and polish larger and better lenses than his contemporaries; in 1659 he published the "Systema Saturnium" interpreting the ring and the cause of its various configurations, and the first discovery of a Saturnian satellite is due to him.

Gascoigne in England about 1640 was the first to make the important application of the micrometer to enhance the accuracy of measurement of small angles in the telescopic field; an invention made and applied independently many years later by Huygens in Holland and Auzout and Picard in France, where the instrument was first regularly employed as an accessory in the work of an observatory.

Another Englishman, Jeremiah Horrocks, was the first observer of a transit of Venus over the disk of the sun, in 1639. Horrocks was possessed of great ability in calculational astronomy also. This was about the time of the invention of the pendulum clock by Huygens, which in conjunction with the later invention of the transit instrument by Roemer wrought a revolution in the exacting art of practical astronomy.

This was because it enabled the time to be carried along continuously, and the revolution of the earth could be utilized in making precise measures of the position of sun, moon, and stars. Louis XIV had just founded the new Observatory at Paris in 1668, and Picard was the first to establish regular time-observations there.

Huygens followed up the motion of the pendulum in theory as well as practice in his "Horologium Oscillatorium" (1673), showing the way to measure the force of gravity, and his study of circular motion showed the fundamental necessity of some force directed toward the center in planetary motions.

The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth being no longer in doubt, the great advance in accuracy of astronomical observation indicated to Willebrord Snell in Holland the best way to measure an arc of meridian by triangulation. Picard repeated the measurements near Paris with even greater accuracy, and his results were of the utmost significance to Newton in establis.h.i.+ng his law of gravitation.

Domenico Ca.s.sini, an industrious observer, voluminous writer, and a strong personality, devised telescopes of great size, discovered four Saturnian satellites and the main division in the ring of Saturn, determined the rotation periods of Mars and Jupiter, and prepared tables of the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites. At his suggestion Richer undertook an expedition to Cayenne in lat.i.tude 5 degrees north, where it was found that the intensity of gravity was less than at Paris, and his clock therefore lost time, thus indicating that the earth was not a perfect sphere as had been thought, but a spheroid instead.

The planet Mars pa.s.sed a near opposition, and Richer's observations of it from Cayenne, when combined with those of Ca.s.sini and others in France, gave a new value of the sun's parallax and distance, really the first actual measurement worth the name in the history of astronomy.

To close this era of signal advance in astronomy we may cite a discovery by Roemer of the first order: no less than that of the velocity of transmission of light through s.p.a.ce. At the instigation of Picard, Roemer in studying the motions of Jupiter's satellites found that the intervals between eclipses grew less and less as Jupiter and the earth approached each other, and greater and greater than the average as the two planets separated farther and farther. Roemer correctly attributed this difference to the progressive motion of light and a rough value of its velocity was calculated, though not accepted by astronomers generally for more than a century.

Why the laws of Kepler should be true, Kepler himself was unable to say.