Clifford J Cunningham Livres

A fully up-to-date view of the remarkable cosmic objects, asteroids.

The discovery of Juno in 1804 by Karl Harding is intricately connected to Johann Bode's law of planetary distances and challenges Georg Hegel's 1801 thesis, which claimed no planets existed between Mars and Jupiter. This narrative highlights how, by 1804, the previously empty gap was populated by three celestial bodies: Ceres, Pallas, and Juno, illustrating the evolving understanding of planetary science in that era.

This book explores the origins of asteroids, focusing on the discovery of Vesta in 1807 by Wilhelm Olbers, who theorized they resulted from a primordial planet's explosion. Cunningham examines historical writings, the connection between meteorites and asteroids, and the controversies surrounding Vesta, offering a comprehensive study of asteroid origins.

Based on extensive primary sources, many never previously translated into English, this is the definitive account of the discovery of Pallas as it went from being classified as a new planet to reclassification as the second of a previously unknown group of celestial objects. Cunningham, a dedicated scholar of asteroids, includes a large set of newly translated correspondence as well as the many scientific papers about Pallas in addition to sections of Schroeter's 1805 book on the subject. It was Olbers who discovered Pallas, in 1802, the second of many asteroids that would be officially identified as such. From the Gold Medal offered by the Paris Academy to solve the mystery of Pallas' gravitational perturbations to Gauss' Pallas Anagram, the asteroid remained a lingering mystery to leading thinkers of the time. Representing an intersection of science, mathematics, and philosophy, the puzzle of Pallas occupied the thoughts of an amazing panorama of intellectual giants in Europe in the early 1800s.