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Neptune: Galileo's secret planet
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Neptune
In the year 2009, the planet isn’t such a secret. It’s Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun. But in Galileo’s time, only six of the eight planets were known; Neptune and Uranus (and the erstwhile planet Pluto) were still a mystery. However, new data from Galileo’s 1613 notebooks shows that the famed astronomer knew of Neptune’s existence 234 years before it was officially discovered, even though the question still remains whether he knew it was a planet.
Professor David Jamieson, Head of the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne, spotted some unusual notations in Galileo’s meticulous notebooks. While studying the moons of Jupiter, the ancient astronomer marked the position of a star that cannot be found on any modern star charts. Computer modeling has revealed that Galileo’s star was actually Neptune—and that he charted it with miraculous accuracy.
To the naked eye, planets appear as bright stars. Venus and Mars can often be seen in the night sky in many cities despite light pollution. But even with a telescope, differentiating the far away Neptune from a star would have been a difficult task.
But there is some evidence to suggest that Galileo already had an inkling that it was a planet. It was already established in that time that a planet differs from a star for it revolves around a sun and moves relative to stars. Therefore, “it is remarkable that on the night of January 28 in 1613 Galileo noted that the ‘star’ we now know is the planet Neptune appeared to have moved relative to an actual nearby star." [EurekAlert]
Another piece supporting evidence that Galileo knew he was looking at something important is the fact that he recorded his January 6th observation of the ‘star’ on the 28th. So something about it made him ponder its existence for over twenty days. Exact dating of the ink used may be carried out later this year, in order to prove that Galileo found Neptune over 200 years before the official finding in 1846.
Jamieson thinks that there may be yet another way to ascertain just what Galileo was thinking. "Galileo was in the habit of sending a scrambled sentence, an anagram, to his colleagues to establish his priority for the sensational discoveries he made with his new telescope. He did this when he discovered the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn. So perhaps somewhere he wrote an as-yet undecoded anagram that reveals he knew he discovered a new planet," he stated. [EurekAlert]
The study was published in the journal Australian Physics.
More astronomy news: 1908 Tunguska explosion was caused by a comet * First definitive evidence of lakes on Mars * Hubble's successors * More
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