Lecture Xiii

THE DISCOVERY OF THE ASTEROIDS

Up to the time of Herschel, astronomical interest centred on the solar system. Since that time it has been divided, and a great part of our attention has been given to the more distant celestial bodies. The solar system has by no means lost its interest--it has indeed gained in interest continually, as we gain in knowledge concerning it; but in order to follow the course of science it will be necessary for us to oscillate to and fro, sometimes attending to the solar system--the planets and their satellites--sometimes extending our vision to the enormously more distant stellar spaces.

Those who have read the third lecture in Part I. will remember the speculation in which Kepler indulged respecting the arrangements of the planets, the order in which they succeeded one another in space, and the law of their respective distances from the sun; and his fanciful guess about the five regular solids inscribed and circumscribed about their orbits.

The rude coincidences were, however, accidental, and he failed to discover any true law. No thoroughly satisfactory law is known at the present day. And yet, if the nebular hypothesis or anything like it be true, there must be some law to be discovered hereafter, though it may be a very complicated one.

An empirical relation is, however, known: it was suggested by Tatius, and published by Bode, of Berlin, in 1772. It is always known as Bode's law.

Bode's law asserts that the distance of each planet is approximately double the distance of the inner adjacent planet from the sun, but that the rate of increase is distinctly slower than this for the inner ones; consequently a better approximation will be obtained by adding a constant to each term of an appropriate geometrical progression. Thus, form a doubling series like this, 1-1/2, 3, 6, 12, 24, &c. doubling each time; then add 4 to each, and you get a series which expresses very fairly the relative distances of the successive planets from the sun, except that the number for Mercury is rather erroneous, and we now know that at the other extreme the number for Neptune is erroneous too.

I have stated it in the notes above in a form calculated to give the law every chance, and a form that was probably fashionable after the discovery of Uranus; but to call the first term of the doubling series 0 is evidently not quite fair, though it puts Mercury's distance right. Neptune's distance, however, turns out to be more nearly 30 times the earth's distance than 38·8. The others are very nearly right: compare column D of the table preceding