WRITTEN IN THE STARS By : Liese Sherwood-Fabre
WRITTEN IN THE STARS By : Liese Sherwood-Fabre
During the Victorian era , expeditions to observe solar eclipses , and amateur and p r o f essional astronomy societies formed across England . ( 1 ) The interest in the heavens and their movements , however , has the longest history of all the sciences . Astronomy was the first natural science to realize a high level of complexity and did so more than 4000 years ago . The Babylonians , Greeks , and those in Islamic countries all built upon the earliest observations of the movements and positions of the sun , moon , planets ( Venus was observed as early as 2000 BCE ), and stars . These studies were able to build upon earlier work because the subjects studied remained stable over millennia . They could also be mathematized and provided religious and philosophical
meanings as well as useful predictions such as the flooding of the Nile . ( 2 )
While astronomy progressed outside of Europe , the study languished until 1175 when the Italian Gerard of Cremona translated Claudius Ptolemy ’ s work on the stars and planets ’ motion from Arabic to Latin . With the creation of universities ( such as Oxford ), the teaching and study of astronomy were included as part of the curriculum . Ptolemy ’ s geocentric model ( with the earth as the center of the universe ) remained the accepted paradigm until Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric ( planets revolve around the sun ) theory in 1543 , simplifying the movement of the planets . His and other works ( including Galileo ’ s ) were banned by the church ( 3 ) and another 100 years passed before it became the standard concept of the universe . ( 4 )
As telescopes became more sophisticated , the identification of additional planets , their moons , and even asteroids occurred . The first asteroid was discovered in 1801 , with three more identified over the next six years . The fifth was not found for more than forty years , but astronomers mapped the 100 th by 1868 . ( 5 )
In addition to discovering further heavenly bodies and mapping them ( astrometrics ), astronomers in Victorian England also contributed to astrophysics — the composition and movement of those bodies . ( 8 ) Of particular importance to the development of this field was the spectroscope . Used first to analyze the chemical makeup of Earth ’ s materials , astronomers later employed the instrument to identify the sun ’ s composition through its spectra . ( 6 )
The Victorian astronomers were not content with only observing and cataloging stars and other bodies , they moved the science forward into understanding both their composition as well as discovering the presence of bodies yet to be found .
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