Chapter 1: The universe and Solar System
CLASSICAL ASTRONOMY
The Aristotle Universe
The greatest philosophers of ancient
Greece are Plato and Aristotle. Their
writings shaped the history of
astronomy.
Plato (427-347 BCE) he wrote about
moral responsibility, ethics, the nature of
reality, and the ideals of civil
government.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)-student of
Plato. He wrote about almost every area
of knowledge and is probably the most
famous philosopher in history.
Ptolemy-is a brilliant mathematician,
and he used his talents to create a
mathematical description of the motions
he saw in heavens. For him first
principles took second place to
mathematical precision.
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
Nicolaus
Copernicus (1473-
1543) pursued a
lifetime career in the
Church, but he was
also a talented
mathematician and
astronomer. His
work triggered a revolution in human
thought. These stamps were issued in
1973 to mark the 500th anniversary of
his birth.
Copernicus began to consider an
alternative to the Ptolemaic universe,
probably while he was still at University.
Sometime before 1514, he wrote an
essay proposing a model of a
heliocentric universe in which the sun,
not Earth, was the center. To explain the
daily and annual cycles of the sky, he
proposed that Earth rotates on its axis
and revolves around the sun. Although
this early essay discusses every major
aspect of his later work, it did not
include observations and calculations.
PLANETARY MOTION
The Copernican Hypothesis
solved the problem of the place of Earth,
but it didn't explain planetary motion.
The puzzle of planetary motion was
solved during the century following the
death of Copernicus through the work of
two men.
Tycho Brahe (1546- 1601) was, during
his lifetime, the most famous
astronomer in the
world. Proud of his
noble rank, he wears
the elephant medal
awarded him by the
king of Denmark. He
was well known for his
vanity and his lordly
manners, and by all accounts he was Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary
proud and haughty nobleman. Tycho's motion
disposition was not improved by a
dueling injury from his University days. An ellipse is a figure that can be drawn
His nose was badly disfigured, and for around two points, called the foci.
the rest of his life he wore false noses
made of gold and silver, stuck on with Table 1-1 | Kepler's Laws of
Planetary Motion
wax.
I. The orbits of the planets are ellipse
In 1572, a "new star" (now called
with the sun at one focus.
Tycho's supernova) appeared in the sky,
shining more brightly than Venus, and II. A line from a planet to the sun
Tycho carefully measured its position. sweeps over equal areas in equal
intervals of time.
Tycho saw no parallax in the
position of the new star, so he III. A planet's orbital period squared is
concluded that it must lie above the proportional to it's average
distance from the sun cubed: P2y =
sphere of the moon and was probably 2
a AU
on the starry sphere itself. This
contradicted Aristotle starry sphere as
perfect and unchanging.
The Rudolphine Tables
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was
Tycho Brahe's The Rudolphine Tables was
successor. Kepler's masterpiece. It could predict
This diagram the positions of the planets 10 to 100
based on one times more accurately than previous
drawn by tables. Kepler's tables were the precise
kepler, shows model of planetary, motion that
how he believed the sizes of the Copernicus had sought but failed to find.
celestial spheres carrying the outer
GALILEO GALILEI (1564-1642)
three planets—Saturn, Jupiter and mars
remembered as the
—are determine universe based on
great defender of
geometrical spacers. The five regular
Copernicanism, also
solids, also known as the platonic solids,
made important
are the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron,
discoveries in the
dodecahedron, and icosahedron. They
physics of motion. He
were considered perfect because the
is honored here on an
faces and the angles between the faces
old Italian 2000-Lira
are the same at every corner.
note. He was born in Pisa, a city what is
now Italy, and studied medicine at the
university there. His true love, however,
was mathematics.
The telescope was apparently
invented around 1608 by lens makers in
Holland. Galileo, hearing descriptions in
the fall of 1609, was able to build
telescopes in his workshop. In fact,
Galileo was not the first person to look
at the sky through a telescope, but he
was the first person to apply telescopic
observations to the theoretical problem
of the day—the place of Earth.
The book Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry
Messenger) reported three major
discoveries.
1. The moon was not perfect– it had
mountains and valleys on its
surface, and Galileo even used
some of the mountains' shadow
to calculate their height.
2. The Milky Way was made up of
myriad stars too faint to see with
the unaided eye.
3. Galileo's telescope revealed four
new "planets" circling Jupiter,
objects known today as the
Galilean moons of Jupiter.
The moons of Jupiter were strong
evidence for the Copernican model.
Sidereus Nuncius was popular and
made Galileo famous. He became chief
mathematician and philosopher to the
Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence.
ISAAC NEWTON AND ORBITAL
MOTION
The birth of modern astronomy
and modern science dated from the 99
years between the deaths of Copernicus
and Galileo. The Renaissance is
commonly taken to be the period
between 1300 and 1600, and that
places the 99 years of this story at the
culmination of the reawakening of
learning in all fields.
Isaac Newton was born in
Woolsthorpe, England, on December
25, 1642, and on
January 4, 1643. So
December 25 in
England was January
4 in Europe. If you use
the English date, then
Newton was born in
the same year that
Galileo Galilei died. Newton was a quiet
child from a farming family, but his work
at school was so impressive that his
uncle financed his education at Trinity
College, where he studied mathematics
and physics. During 1665 and 1666,
Newton spent his time at home in
Woolsthorpe, thinking and studying.
The mass of an object is a
measure of the amount of matter in the
object, usually expressed in kilograms.
He recognized that the force of gravity
decreases as the square of the distance
between the objects increases. If the
distance were tripled, the force would
decrease by a factor of 33, which equals
9. This relationship is known as the
inverse square relation.
THE GREAT CHAIN OF ORIGINS
 You are linked through a great
chain of origins that leads backward
through time to the instant when
universe began, 13.7 billion years ago.
History of the Atoms in Your Body
The universe
began in the Big
Bang. By the time
the universe was
a few minutes
old, the protons, neutrons, and electrons
in your body had come into existence.
The matter in the early universe was
about 75 percent hydrogen (by mass)
and 25 percent helium. Although your
body does not contain helium, it does
contain many of those ancient hydrogen
atoms unchanged since the universe
began.
Big Bang Theory—the universe started
with small singularity then inflated.
The Solar Nebula Theory
Astronomers have proposed two kinds
of hypotheses for the origin of planets:
1. Catastrophic hypotheses
proposed that planets formed
from some improbable event
such as collision of the sun and
another scar.
2. Evolutionary hypotheses
proposed that planets formed
gradually and naturally as the sun
formed.
Two Kinds of Planets
Solar system comes from the
division of the planets into two groups,
the small Earth-like worlds and the giant
Jupiter-like worlds.
Notice three important points and learn
two new terms:
1. The two kinds of planets are
distinguished by their location.
The four inner Terrestrial
planets are quite different
from the four outer Jovian
planets
2. Craters are common. Almost
every solid surface in the
solar system is covered with
craters.
3. The two groups of planets
are also distinguished by
properties such as number of
moons and presence or
absence of rings. A theory of
the origin of the planets needs
to explain those properties.
Cosmic Debris
The sun and planets are not only
products of the solar nebula. The solar
system is littered with several kinds of
space debris: asteroids, Kuiper belt
objects, comets, and meteoroids.
The Asteroids, sometimes called
minor planets, are small rocky worlds,
most of which orbit the sun in a belt
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
(more than 100,000 have orbits that are
charted).
 Since 1992, astronomers have
discovered more than thousand small,
dark, icy bodies orbiting in the outer
fringes of the solar system beyond
Neptune. The collection objects is called
the Kuiper belt after astronomer Gerard
Kuiper (KYE-per), who predicted their
existence in the 1950s.
A comet may be visible for many
weeks as it sweeps through the inner
solar system. The brightest comets can
be seen with the naked eye and are
impressively beautiful objects.
TERRESTRIAL and JOVIAN
PLANETS
1)The inner four planets, Mercury,
Venus, Earth, and Mars, are
Terrestrial planets meaning they are
small, dense, rocky worlds with little
or no atmosphere. The outer four
planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and
Neptune, are Jovian planets meaning
they are large, low-density worlds
with thick atmosphere and liquid or
ice interiors.
1a. In Terrestrial planets, Earth is the
most massive but the Jovian planets are
much more massive. Jupiter contains
over 300 Earth masses, Saturn nearly
100 Earth masses. Uranus and
Neptune, respectively, contain 15 and
17 Earth masses.
2) Earth has about 150 impact craters
but many more have been erased by
erosion. Mercury is so close to the sun it
is difficult to study from Earth. The
MESSENGER spacecraft flew past
Mercury three times in 2008—2009 and
went into orbit in 2011 returning detailed
photos of the planet's entire surface.
2a. the surface of Venus is not visible
through its cloudy atmosphere, but radar
maps reveal a dry world of craters and
volcanoes.
3) The Terrestrial planets have densities
like that of rock or metal. The Jovian
planets all have low densities, and
Saturn's density is only 70 percent the
density of water. It would float in a big-
enough bathtub.
3a. The atmospheres of the Jovian
planets are turbulent, and some are
marked by great storms such as the
Great Red Spot on Jupiter, but the
atmospheres are not deep. If Jupiter
were shrunk to a few centimeters in
diameter, its atmosphere would be no
deeper than the fuzz on a badly worn
tennis ball.
3b. The interiors of the Jovian planets
contain small cores of heavy elements
such as metals, surrounded by a liquid.
Jupiter and Saturn contain hydrogen
forced into a liquid state by the high
pressure. Less-massive Uranus and
Neptune contain heavy-element cores
surrounded by partially solid water
mixed with heavy material such as rocks
and materials.
3c. All four Jovian planets have ring
systems. Saturn's rings are made of ice
particles. The rings of Jupiter, Uranus,
and Neptune are made of dark rocky
particles. Terrestrial planets have no
rings.
Figure 1-15 Comets orbit the sun in
long, elliptical orbits and become visible
when the sun's heat vaporizes its ices
and pushes the gas and dust into a tail
pointing away from the sun. (a) A comet
may remain visible in the evening or
morning sky for weeks as it moves
through the inner solar system. Although
comets are moving rapidly along their
orbits, they
are so distant
that, on any
particular
evening, a
comet seems to hang motionless in the
sky. Comet Hyakutake is shown here
near Polaris in 1996. (b) A comet in a
long, elliptical orbit becomes visible
when the sun's heat vaporizes its ices
and pushes the gas and dust away in a
tail.
Meteors—flash across the sky in
momentary streaks of light. They are
commonly called "shooting stars".
Friction with the air vaporizes the
material about 80 km (50 mi) above
Earth's surface. In space, before its
fiery plunge, the object is called a
meteoroid, and any part of it that
survives its fiery passage to Earth's
surface is called a meteorite.
Age of the Solar System
According to the solar nebula
theory, the planets should be about the
same age as the sun. The most
accurate way to find the age of a rock
body is to bring a sample into the
laboratory and analyze the radioactive
elements it contains. When a rock
solidifies, it incorporates known
percentages of the chemical elements.
A few of these elements have forms
called isotopes that are radioactive,
meaning they decay into other isotopes.
For example, potassium-40, called a
parent isotope, decays into calcium-40
and argon-40, called daughter
isotopes. The half-life of potassium-40
is 1.3 billion years. Uranium-238 decays
with a half-life of 4.5 billion years to form
lead-206 and other isotopes.
The oldest Earth rocks so far
discovered and dated are tiny zircon
crystals from Australia that are 4.4
billion years old.
Figure 1-17
(a) The radioactive atoms (red) in a
mineral sample decay into daughter
atoms (blue). Half the the radioactive
atoms are left after one half-life, a fourth
after two half-lives, an eighth after three
half-lives,and so on. (b) Radioactive
dating shows that this fragment of the
Allende meteorite is 4.56 billion years
old. It contains a few even older
interstellar grains, which formed long
before our solar system.
THE STORY OF PLANET BUILDING According to the solar nebula
theory, the observed pattern of planet
Analysis of the solar spectrum shows that the
densities originated when solid grains
sun is mostly hydrogen, with a quarter of its
first formed, a process called
mass being helium and only about 2 percent
condensation.
being heavier elements.
Table 1-3 | Observed and
Table 1-2 | Characteristic Properties
Uncompressed Densities
of the Solar System
Observed Uncompressed
1. Disk shape of the solar system
Orbits in nearly the same plane Planet Density Density
3
Common direction of rotation and (g/cm ) (g/cm3 )
revolution Mercury 5.44 5.30
2. Two planetary types Venus 5.24 3.96
Terrestrial–inner planets; high Earth 5.50 4.07
density Mars 3.94 3.73
Jovian–outer planets; low density Even farther from the sun there
3. Planetary rings and large satellite was a boundary called the ice line
systems beyond which water vapor could freeze
YES for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, to form ice particles.
and Neptune
NO for Mercury, Venus, Earth, and The sequence in which the different
Mars materials condense from the gas as you
4. Space debris-asteroids, comets, and
move away from the sun toward lower
meteoroids Composition, Orbits
Asteroids in inner solar system, temperature is called the condensation
composition like Terrestrial planets sequence (Table 1-4).
Comets in outer solar system,
composition like Jovian planets
5. Common age of about 4.6 billion Formation of Planetesimals
years measured or inferred for Earth,
In the development of the planets from
the moon, Mars, meteorites, and the
sun. the material of solar nebula disk, three
processes operated to collect solid bits
Condensation of Solids of matter—metal, rock, ice—into larger
bodies called planetesimals, which
The uncompressed densities—
eventually made the planets.
the densities the planets would have if
their gravity did not compress them, or
to put it another way, the average Table 1-4 | The Condensation
densities of their original construction Sequence
materials—can be calculated using the
actual densities and masses of each
planet (Table 1-3).
 Conden Planet
Temperature sate ( Estimated
(K) Temperature
of
Formation;
K)
1500 Metal Mercury
oxides ( 1400 )
1300 Metallic
iron and
nickel
1200 Silicates
1000 Feldspa Venus ( 900 )
rs
680 Troilite Earth ( 600 )
(FeS) Mars ( 450 )
175 H2 O ice Jovian ( 175 )
150 Ammoni
a-water
ice
120 Methan
e-water
ice
65 Argon- Pluto ( 65 )
neon ice
The second process of
planetesimals format ion is accretion,
the sticking together of solid particles.

Growth of Protoplanets

The violent impacts of infalling particles

would also have released energy called
heat of formation.

Differentiation is the separation of

material according to density.

The creation of a planetary atmosphere

from a planet's interior is called
outgassing.