History Of Astronomy In Renaissance And Early Modern Europe

Very few study regions catch the heart of the Renaissance as much as astronomy. In this area, physics coincided with metaphysics and asked how and why the universe existed. Not only did astronomy visit the most significant conflict between science and the church, but allegations of murder and misconduct befitting a Greek disaster more than a history of science in a collection of academic jealousy brought to an extreme.

Copernican revolution

During the Renaissance, astronomy began a revolution in thought known as the Copernican Revolution. It is named after the famous astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus proposed a heliocentric system in which the planets revolved around the Sun rather than the Earth.

He issued his book titled "On the Rotation of Heavenly Bodies" in 1543. While this claim was highly controversial in the long run, it only generated minor controversy at the outset. This theory became the dominant view as many figures, notably Galileo Galilei, Johannes Klepper, and Isaac Newton, defended and improved upon this work. Other statistics, such as Tyco Brahe, contributed to this new model despite not believing in the general theory with his famous observations.

Brahe, a Danish nobleman, was a vital astronomer during this time. He exploded onto the astronomy scene with the bulletin of De Nova Stella, in which he refuted the established wisdom about the supernova SN 1572, or Supernova Tyco. "This supernova was initially as glowing as Venus, which was later suppressed from the bare eye, disproved the Aristotelian opinions about the immutability of the heavens. But five other stars revolve near the Sun. It connected the Copernican system with the Ptolemaic scheme.

People thought in this system when they did not take heliocentrism but could no longer tolerate the Ptolemaic scheme. He is best understood for his detailed statements about the stars and the solar system. Subsequently, he transferred to Prague and resumed his work. In Prague, he was operating on the Rudolfinum tables, which he did not finish until after his death.

The Rudolphian Tables were a star map created to be more accurate than the Alphonsine tables made in the 1300s and the less precise Protonic tables.

At this time, she was assisted by her assistant Johannes Klepper, who later used her observations to complement Brahe's work and her theories.

After Brahe's death, Klepper was considered his successor, and his unfinished works, such as the Rudolfinum tables, were entrusted to him. He completed Rudolfinum's tables in 1624, although it was published several years ago. Like many other figures of this period, he suffered from religious and political problems, such as the Thirty Years' War, which led to the anarchy that almost destroyed some of his works. Clapper, however, was the first to attempt to disentangle mathematical predictions of celestial motions from assumed physical causes. He discovered Clapper's three laws of planetary motion, which now bear his name, as follows:

A- The orbit of a planet is elliptical, with the Sun at one of the two foci.

B- A line segment that joins a planet and the Sun will destroy the equatorial regions at equal intervals.

C- The square of the orbital time of a planet is proportionate to the cube of the semi-major axis of its rotation.

With these rules, he managed to improve the existing heliocentric model. The first two were published in 1906. Clapper's contributions improved the overall system and gave it more credibility because it adequately explained events and could make more reliable predictions. Previously, the Copernican model was more reliable than the Ptolemaic model. This development occurred because Clapper realized that orbits are not perfect circles but ellipses.

Galileo Galilei was one of the first to use a telescope to observe the sky, building a 20x telescope. He discovered the four large moons of Moshtri in 1610, now known collectively as the Galilean moons. The eclipse was the first known observation of moons orbiting another planet. He also discovered that the Moon has craters and observed and correctly explained sunspots.

Venus also shows a complete set of phases similar to the steps of the Moon. Galileo argued that these facts showed inconsistency with the Ptolemaic model, which could not explain the phenomenon and even contradicted it. With the moons, he showed that the Earth does not have to have everything around it and that other parts of the solar system can revolve around another body, like the Earth orbiting the Sun. In the Ptolemaic system, celestial bodies must be perfect, so they must not have craters or sunspots.

Phases can only occur if Venus's orbit is inside the Earth's orbit, which would not happen if the Earth was the center. As the most famous example, he faced challenges from church authorities, especially the Roman Inquisition. They accused Galileo of heresy because these ideas were contrary to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and challenged the authority of the Catholic Church when it was at its weakest. While he managed to avoid punishment for a short time, he was eventually tried and confessed to heresy in 1633. Although his work was done at a cost, his book was appreciated, and he was kept under house arrest until he died in 1642.

Sir Isaac Newton made further links between physics and astronomy through his law of universal gravitation. Realizing that the same force that attracts objects to the Earth's surface keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth, Newton was able to explain all known gravitational phenomena "within a theoretical framework." He extracted Kepler's laws from the first principles in his book Mathematical Principles of Natural Science, published by himself in 1687. Those basic principles are as follows:

A- In an inertial frame of reference, an object remains at rest or continues moving at a constant speed unless acted upon by force.

B- In an inertial frame of reference, the vector sum of the forces F on a body is equal to the mass m of that body, the coefficient in the acceleration an of the body: F = ma (it is assumed here that the mass m is constant)

C- When an object exerts a force on the second object, the second object simultaneously exerts a force of equal magnitude and opposite direction on the first object.

* Newton's theoretical developments laid many of the foundations of modern physics.

Completion of the solar system

Outside of England, Newton's theory took some time to establish itself. Descartes' theory of vortices prevailed in France, and Huygens, Leibniz, and Cassini accepted only parts of Newton's systems and preferred their philosophies. Voltaire published a popular report in 1738. In 1748, the French Academy of Sciences offered a prize for solving the Jupiter-Saturn perturbations, which Euler and Lagrange eventually solved. Laplace completed his theory of the planets, which was published from 1798 to 1825. The early origin of the solar nebula model of planet formation began.

Edmund Halley succeeded Flamstead as Royal Astronomer in England and predicted the comet's return in 1758.

Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus, the first new planet observed in modern times, in 1781.

The gap between the planets Mars and Jupiter, revealed by Titius-Bode's law, was filled by the discovery of the asteroids Ceres and Pallas in 1801 and 1802.

Initially, astronomical thinking in America was based on Aristotelian philosophy, but interest in the new astronomy appeared in the annals as early as 1959.

Stellar Astrology

Cosmic pluralism is the name given to the idea that stars are distant suns, perhaps with their planetary systems. In ancient times, Anaxagoras and Aristarchus of Samos expressed statements in this direction, but the mainstream did not accept them. The first European renaissance astronomer to suggest that the solar stars are distant was Giordano Bruno in his book "On the World and Worlds of the Unseen (1584)". This idea was among the charges leveled against him by the Inquisition, though not prominently. This idea became mainstream in the late 17th century, especially after the publication of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by Bernard Le Beauvoir de Fontenelle (1686). By the early 18th century, it was the default assumption in stellar astronomy.

In 1667, the Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari recorded changes in the brightness of the star al-Ghul "Ras al-Ghul." Edmund Halley published the first measurement of the correct motion of a pair of adjacent "fixed" stars, showing that they had changed position since ancient Greek times, confirmed by astronomers such as Ptolemy and Hipparchus. William Herschel was the foremost astronomer who attempted to specify the allocation of stars in the sky. During the 1780s, he made a series of measurements in 600 directions and counted the stars observed in each line of sight.

From this, he deduced that the number of stars steadily increases towards one side of the sky, towards the core of the Milky Way. His son John Herschel replicated this investigation in the southern hemisphere and discovered a corresponding growth in the same path. Among his other achievements, William Herschel is noted for his discovery that some stars do not simply lie along a line of sight.