With all the news about Rosetta landing on a comet after 12 years in space, I wanted to kick off with the person who discovered the largest asteroid in our solar system, or maybe it’s a dwarf planet now…Ceres.
Back when I was taking Astronomy in high school, I recall that Astronomers and other Scientists back in the 1700s or so believed there had to be a “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter. The great Kepler proposed this in 1596 via one of his books and then there was this goofy formula Scientists followed, assuming it meant the planets have predictable locations for their orbits. Turns out, it was only a coincidence for the inner planets because this string of numbers wasn’t even close when it came to finding Uranus, Neptune and eventually the dwarf planet Pluto. There was one exception, the string backed Kepler’s hypothesis of some celestial object no one had discovered.
Enter Giuseppe Piazzi.
Piazzi was born in 1746 to a wealthy family so he received a very good education and then joined the Catholic Church. Through his clerical position he became a university instructor who travelled to various institutions teaching Philosophy. When what would become the University of Palermo was founded, he was offered the chair of the Mathematics department. Six years later he was given the task of starting an Astronomy department. Now remember, this is the 18th to 19th century. Many academic disciplines overlap unlike today, besides, I think Piazzi’s Math background helped immensely with his underdeveloped Astronomy abilities.
All these efforts paid off on January 1, 1801 when Piazzi discovered Ceres. It was originally classified as a full-blown planet but eventually was demoted to an asteroid by the 1850s as numerous other objects were found in Ceres’ vicinity, thus experts concluded we have an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Contrary to The Empire Strikes Back, it isn’t very dense nor hard to fly through.
We’ve learned more about Ceres last year when NASA’s probe Dawn landed on it.
Piazzi didn’t rest on his laurels over Ceres though. He also headed up the most complete star catalog of his day covering over 7500 stars.