The planets - a new book by Dava Sobel - continuation of the first chapter

The chapters of the book follow the planets, and are inspired by them to develop a comprehensive and wide-ranging discussion on topics that still occupy science enthusiasts and its opponents - UFOs, astrology, religion. We bring here the second part from the first chapter "Example Worlds - Overview". The book was published by Modan

The music of literature - Saturn
In 1916-1914, the English composer Gustav Holst created the only known example of a symphonic tribute to the solar system, Opus 32, 'The Planets, Suite for Orchestra'. Neither Haydn's "Mercury" (Symphony No. 43 in E flat major), nor Mozart's "Jupiter" (No. 41 in C flat; Kahl 551), expressed such pretentious ambition. In fact, the name of the work, 'Justice', was associated with Mozart's work only a few decades after his death. Similarly, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was known for 30 years as Opus 27, No. 2, before the poet who modeled its melody on moonlight across a lake arose.

In the suite 'The Planets' there are seven moves and not nine. When Holst wrote his work, Pluto had not yet been discovered and Holst did not include Earth in his work. Even so, the work remains a musical accompaniment to the space age, partly because listeners still like it, and partly because no other work has replaced it in this role. Contemporary composers expanded the piece to compensate for its shortcomings, adding new movements, such as 'Pluto', 'The Sun' and 'Planet X'.

Holst became interested in the planets following his interest in astrology. In 1913, after a burst of reading on the subject, he began to predict the horoscopes of friends and think about the planets in terms of their astrological meanings - 'Joyful Jupiter', 'Magician Uranus' and 'Mystical Neptune'. His daughter and biographer, Imogen, also a composer, said that her father's compulsive hobby of astrology pushed him to study astronomy, "and the thrill of doing so would raise his body temperature every time he tried to understand too much at once. He relentlessly pursued the idea of ​​a space-time continuum.”

A natural affinity between music and astronomy has existed since at least the sixth century BC, when the Greek mathematician Pythagoras introduced 'geometry in the hum of the strings' and 'music in the spaces of the digits'. Pythagoras believed that the cosmic order obeyed the proportions and mathematical laws governing the notes of the musical scale. Plato wrote the idea 200 years later, in his book 'The State', and introduced the unforgettable phrase 'the music of literature' to describe the melodic perfection of the heavens. Plato also spoke of 'heavenly harmony' and 'the most heavenly choir' - terms that suggested the singing of angels, although they refer specifically to the inaudible polyphony of the planets in their orbits.

Copernicus cites the 'Ballet of the Planets' in the choreography of his heliocentric universe, and Kepler built on Copernicus' work by repeatedly returning to the major and minor scales. In 1599, Kepler produced a chord of C major by comparing the speed of the planets to the intervals that can be played on a stringed instrument. Saturn, the most distant and slowest planet, produced the lowest of the six notes of the chord, and Mercury - the highest.

While developing his three laws of planetary motion, Kepler expanded the sounds of the planets from single notes into short melodies, in which single tones represented different speeds at given points along different orbits. "With this symphony of voices," he said, "man may play the eternity of time in less than an hour, and taste in small measure the delight of the supreme artist, by way of summoning the so sweet pleasure of music that imitates God."

As part of his book 'Harmonice Mundi' (Harmonice Mundi, 1619), Kepler recorded a musical pentacle with keys for all the parts, and placed the theme of each planet in the slanted, hollow tablature of his time. The repeated chorus of Mercury, very eccentric, fast and single-angled, spread seven octaves above the mouthpiece of Saturn, passing from low S to C and back again.

"I feel possessed and moved, with an enthusiasm that cannot be described in words, by the spectacular spectacle of the harmony of the sky," Kepler said. "Open up the sky and then there will be real music."

The two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and currently making their way to the outer limits of the solar system, continued this musical legacy. The two spacecraft, potential messengers to beings from outer space, carry a specially made golden record (including the necessary equipment to play it) that expresses the music of the planets as computerized tones indicating the speeds of the planets in the solar system. Voyager's interstellar record also says "hello" in 55 languages ​​and plays music chosen from many cultures and composers, including Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry.

Either intentionally or inspired, Gustav Holst ignored the conventional order of the planets and began his work in July 1914 with 'Mars the Warmaker'. Indeed, that autumn, a real war broke out, called by Holst's contemporaries 'The Great War', but Holst, 40 years old and exempt from active duty due to neuritis and myopia, continued straight to 'Peacemaker Venus'. In performance, as well as in order of composition, the full suite always begins with Mars, progresses inwards to Venus and 'Hema, the winged messenger', then turns outwards again to Jupiter, and on, through Saturn, to Uranus and Neptune, and there the voices of the women's choir, closed in the room outside to the stage, fading towards the end (without giving up the intensity of the singing), through a silent and slow closing of a door.

The suite's immediate success with the general public stunned Holst and transformed him from a respected musician to a famous composer. When forced to talk about the 'planets' in public, Holst made it clear that 'Saturn creates the old woman' - the longest of the suite's seven movements, 90 minutes and 40 seconds - is his favorite. "Saturn carries with it not only physical decay," Holst said in defense of the planet, "but also a vision of self-realization."

Ringed Saturn, the icon of spirituality, was first observed through a simple home telescope, and is best suited to turn an unsuspecting observer into an avid astronomer. The spectacular system of Saturn's rings spreads over a sheet 290 thousand kilometers wide from one end of one ring - or ansa - to the end of the other. The generous width of the rings is like the distance between the Earth and the Moon, but the average ring thickness is about the height of a 30-story building. In Holst's day, the metaphors used by astronomers to describe the disproportionate flatness of the rings were pancakes and records, and eventually everything settled down to a football-field-sized cardboard board (improved measurements have since replaced the cardboard with tissue paper).

Saturn appears, with Jupiter and Venus, in a painting of the night sky over the Cotswolds region of England, so beloved of Holst, a painting given to him at a festival held in his honor in 1927, where he won the 'planets' for the last time. The painter Harold Cox said that he consulted the Royal Astronomer regarding the correct position of the planets on a May night in 1919 - the year when 'The Planets' was played for the first time in a live performance in front of an audience, and Holst was awarded a position as a lecturer at the Royal College of Music. In the painting, Saturn appears to be only a bright spot, less prominent than the lights of Jupiter or Venus, and lacks rings, of course, since it is impossible to distinguish the famous rings with the naked eye. However, it should not be claimed that the rings are not visible or missing in the painting. On the contrary, the rings sparkle with ice and snow, so bright, they triple the brightness of Saturn. All the components of the rings - components ranging in size from a grain of dust to rocks as large as houses - are considered to be covered in ice at least, and maybe even made entirely of frozen water. Saturn's body, on the other hand, is a gas giant, like Jupiter, made of hydrogen and helium but smaller and paler and twice as far from the Sun. Without the ice crystals, snowflakes and snowballs of all sizes surrounding it, Saturn would not be so dazzling and charming to viewers a billion miles away.

In May 1919, to Saturn's artistic luck, the rings tilted slightly toward Earth. About once every 15 years, or to be more precise, twice in Saturn's 29.5-year orbit around the sun, the rings turn towards their earthly admirers, and the flattering pine retreats. At such times, all that can be seen from the rings, and even in a telescope, is a thin line of shadow across the planet's yellowish globe. Such periodic disappearances left early ring watchers at a loss.

Galileo, who was the first to notice the bulges next to Saturn in July 1610, was wrong and estimated that it was a pair of close "companions", which did not move like the satellites of Jupiter, but hugged the side of the planet and gave it a "three-body" appearance. For the next two years, Galileo followed Saturn, and at the end of the fall of 1612 he confessed that he was amazed to discover the planet suddenly lonely and round, without its longtime companions. "What can be said now about such a strange metamorphosis?" wrote to a fellow philosopher. Could it be that the planet Saturn, like its mythological counterpart, "preyed its own children?"

Galileo predicted that the attendants would return, and when they returned they appeared very different. In 1616 Galileo said they looked like a pair of knobs on Saturn, and later compared them to ears, but, in fact, never understood the fantastic nature of their true identity. It was only in 1656 that the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens linked the changing shape of Saturn to the existence of a "wide, flat ring, not touching anywhere, and inclined to the Milky Way". The full explanation was published by Huygens in his book 'Systema Saturnium', in 1659.

Huygens always spoke of the 'Ring of Saturn' as one solid entity, and so it was considered until 1675, when Jean-Dominique Cassini, director of the Paris Observatory, identified a dark dividing line that split the ring into two concentric orbits, called 'A' (the outer ) and 'B' (the inner and brighter). Two centuries later, a third segment was born - the dim inner ring 'C', discovered in 1850 - and yet, no one could confidently explain how the rings were formed. Opinions about the structure of the rings were pitted against each other for a decisive battle, and they ranged from solid surfaces to swarms of small satellites, tunnels of rotating liquid to evaporating planetary vapors.

"I have broken several holes in the solid ring," boasted the young James Clark Maxwell in Scotland in 1857, understanding his mathematical calculations, "and now I wade through the liquid ring, in a spectacular collision between the various symbols." Maxwell was convinced that Saturn's gravity would crush a solid structure of such large dimensions, so he concluded that the rings are a multitude of individual particles that, due to their enormous number, create an illusion of solidity from a distance. According to Kepler's laws, every particle necessarily strives for an independent trajectory, and the particles furthest from Saturn will move at the lowest speeds, and the closer ones - faster, just as Saturn itself moved heavily around the Sun, compared to the fast pace of the planet Mercury (these are choral songs Kepler composed for the vast multitude this!).

Inside the dense rings, each particle always pushes its neighbors, and the particles push each other into narrower or wider orbits due to energy and momentum exchanges. Moreover, due to the collisions, particles are thrown above and below the flat plane of the rings, but these strays are quickly brought back into line.

Since 1966, the classical rings of Saturn, A, B, and C, have been joined by four more rings, marked D through G. The order of the group gives God the alphabetical order of the discovery of the rings, as they progress from Saturn outwards - D, C, B, A, F, G, E – like musical notes in a practice scale. Each area differs from its fellows in slight changes of color or brightness or in the density of its particles or in its unique shape. In a lucky observation from a spacecraft, these segments are spread out into countless thin rings, separated from each other by countless tiny spaces, and tiny satellites patrol between them, embedded in them.

The ring system was probably formed as a result of the breakup of an icy moon or a trapped planet-like body, with a diameter of about 100 kilometers. It is possible that this helpless body, which was destroyed several hundred million years ago, is still striving to be rebuilt in Saturn's orbit. Its particles attract each other by gravity and stick together, forming larger clusters that attract more particles to grow even larger, but up to a certain point. Any accreting body in the ring, which exceeds a certain size limit, is torn apart by Saturn's tidal forces, and thus the scattered pieces seem destined never to unite into a single satellite.

Earth's moon, which had undergone a similar phase in its development as a ring of collision fragments, gathered itself, however, because its parts moved far enough from our planet to escape the destructive effects of tidal forces. Saturn's rings are huddled together. They inhabit a nearby region of perpetual crush, known as the Roche region, named after the 19th-century French astronomer Edouard Roche, who formulated the safe distances for planetary satellites. Saturn's larger moons all lie far beyond the Roche domain, outside the circumference of the rings. However, Saturn's extended family (at least 34 moons at last count) includes many small members within the rings and in its orbit, which help create the image of complexity. The F ring, for example, owes its curving and narrow contours to the action of two satellites, one of which runs quickly to the inner side of the ring, and the other - licks it from the outside. Together they work as "shepherd" satellites, bringing the flocks of particles between them into tangles, knots, entanglements and curls.

In the summer of 2004, the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn, and announced its arrival by ascending through the gap between the F and G rings, fluttering along the great expanses of the ring plane, and then diving back down unscathed, through the far side of the gap it appeared through. The relative emptiness of such spaces is a result of the mutual relations between Saturn's satellites and the particles in the rings obeying the laws defined by Pythagoras in his string experiments.

Pythagoras showed that the pitch of the string increased by an octave when he shortened it by half. Playing the two strings of these two lengths together, he said, was pleasing to the ear, because their vibrations resonated in the whole number ratio 1:2. Other whole ratios – or resonances – yielded other beautiful musical intervals, such as terrazzos, quartets, and quintets. Galileo, in his book 'Two New Sciences', dealt with the effects of the sympathetic oscillations, and claimed that the octave was "rather bland and lacks flame", while the sound of the 2:3 resonance (the musical interval of a fifth) caused "a tickling of the tympanic membrane, so that its delicacy becomes full Animals, and the impression is created of a gentle kiss and a bite, at the same time."

The most prominent resonance effect in Saturn's rings is the 'Cassini Division', an interval of about 5,000 kilometers between the A and B rings. The spacing is due to the 2:1 resonance with the Mims moon, which sails far away, 65 thousand kilometers and more. The ring particles within the 'Cassini gap' orbit Saturn twice per Mims time, and so they repeatedly catch up with the slowly moving moon along the orbit at these exact points. And there, at these points, they move to the moon under the influence of gravity. Finally, the pull of the moon, amplified by rhythmic recurrence, kicks the particles out of the resonant orbit and clears the gap. A similar, though narrower, gap near the outer edge of the A ring, called the 'Hanke gap' (after Joan Henke, former director of the Berlin Observatory), shares a 3:5 resonance with Mims and a 5:6 resonance with another moon The decorative curled border on the outer edge of the A ring also owes its six petal-like lobes to the 6:7 resonance with two small satellites, which occupy one orbit and may have once been a single object.

The rings also resonate to the rhythm of Saturn's rapidly rotating magnetic field. The magnetic field is produced within the planet's liquid-metallic right face, and rotates in coordination with Saturn's rotation every 10.2 hours. Particles in ring B moving exactly at this speed - or at half the speed or twice it - are consequently driven from their orbit.

For 300 years Saturn was the only ringed world, until the discoveries of the 70s and 80s showed that all gas giants carry rings of some kind. Jupiter has wiry, transparent, sparse rings that contain slag that has broken off from the surface of several small moons. Uranus has nine dark, narrow rings with sharply defined boundaries and are brought together by shepherd satellites. The five dusty and pale rings of Neptune are so uneven in thickness, and in some parts they are so thin as to be almost nothing, leaving the impression of rings made of partial arcs. However, not one of these sets of rings that have been identified recently can pose a real competition to the baroque (or perhaps rather rococo style) rings of Saturn. However, each of the others embodies a single nuance of ring dynamics - some of the phenomena also exist in Saturn, but are swallowed up by the volume of variations and the abundance of decorations.

All rings are subject to constant change in repeated cycles of construction and dissolution. They are similar but different from year to year. They are eroded and worn out by the friction of internal collisions, and a new flow of lunar dust and falling meteorites renews the supply of particles to them.

Each set of rings, a product of gravity and harmony, offers a template for cosmic design. Rings retrace the birth of our entire family of planets, rising from the flat, spinning disk that circled the infant Sun five billion years ago. Today, the rings often find an echo also in the so-called 'protoplanetary disks', which are distinguished around distant young stars, where the raw materials, gas and dust, come together in the synthesis of new worlds. Saturn's rings thus connect our solar system to other solar systems in the making and the present solar system to its ancient past.

"Music", as Holst claimed in a letter to a friend, "since it is the same as the sky, is not a matter of momentary excitement, nor even the excitement of an hour. She is an eternal being."

Mythology - planet Hema The planets speak an ancient dialect of myth. Their names bring back to life what happened before history, before science, when Prometheus was chained to that rock in the Caucasus Mountains as punishment for stealing fire from the sky, and Europe was not a continent but still a child, the lover of a god disguised as a bull who seduced her.

In those days, Hermes - or Mercurius, as the Romans called the messenger of the Greek gods - flew, quick as a thought, on heavenly missions, which earned him more mentions than any other Olympian god in the stories of mythology: after the harvest question lost her only daughter to the god of the underworld, Mercurius was sent to negotiate the rescue the victim, and drove her home in a golden chariot drawn by black horses; When Cupid got his wish and made Psyche an immortal daughter - and therefore worthy of marrying him - it was Mercurius who led the bride into the palace of the gods.

The planet Hema, Mercury, appeared to the eyes of the ancients, as it appears to the naked eye today, just above the horizon, where it cruised in the twilight zone between day and night. The nimble planet Mercury preceded the sun at sunrise or chased it at sunset. The other planets - Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - can be seen high in the sky all night for whole months. However, the star Hema always ran from darkness to light or vice versa and disappeared from sight within one hour. Similarly, the god Mercurius acted as a mediator, crossing the realms of the living and the dead, accompanying the souls of the dead down to their final resting place in the underworld.

It may have been the myth that gave the star the god's name, as it reflected his characteristics, or perhaps it was the star's behavior that inspired the legends about the god. Either way, the union of the planet Mercury with the divine Mercurius—and with Hermes and the wise Babylonian deity Naboo before him—was sealed by the fifth century BC.

The tenacious character of Mercurius, lean and determined as a marathon runner, is a human embodiment of the mission. The wings on his sandals spur him on, sent forward by the power of the wings on his hat and the magical powers of his winged staff. Speed ​​is the pinnacle of his powers, but Mercurius also earned him fame as a giant killer (after he slaughtered Argos the thousand-eyed) and as the god of music (because he invented the harp, and his son, Pan, fashioned the shepherds' reed flute), as the god of commerce and the protector of merchants (hence it is implied Named with words like "merchant" and "mercantile", commercial), to treachery and theft (because he stole flocks from his half-brother, Apollo, on the first day of his life), to tongues (because he gave Pandora the gift of language), as well as to cunning , the knowledge, the luck, the roads, the travelers, the young men in general and the shepherds in particular. Its shaft, with a snake entwined in it, the symbol of medicine, has been associated throughout the generations with fertility or recovery or wisdom.

The planet Mercury and its traveling friends drew attention to them by moving among the fixed stars - thus earning their name 'planetai', which means "wanderers" in Greek. The regularity of their movements created "cosmos" out of "chaos", these are also Greek words, and inspired a whole lexicon of the description of the planetary movements. Just as the names of the gods are still associated with the planets, other Greek concepts, such as 'apogee', 'phrygian', 'eccentricity', and 'ephemeris', are added to be used in scientific discussions. The first observers who coined these words fill the ranks of a long list of heroes, from Thales of Miletus (642-546 BC), the founding Greek scientist, who predicted a solar eclipse and studied the nature of matter in the universe, to Plato (427-347 BC), who saw We do not see the planets as fixed on seven digits of a crystal, intertwined with each other, swirling in the eighth digit of the fixed stars, and all centered around the solid earth. Aristotle (384-322 BC) increased the number of the celestial digits to 54, to provide a better explanation for the deviations from circular orbits observed in the orbits of the planets, and until Ptolemy established astronomy, in the second century AD, the main digits were further expanded, using Smaller elaborate circles, 'epicycles' (epicycles) and 'deferents', needed to offset the observed complexities of the planetary motions.

"I know that I am mortal by nature and transitory," reads the introduction to Ptolemy's great astronomical treatise, the Almagest, "but when I follow for my pleasure the windings of the heavenly bodies forward and backward, my feet no longer touch the earth: standing Selfish in the presence of Zeus himself and taking from the ambrosia - the food of the gods".

In Ptolemy's model, the planet Mercury moves around the Earth, just behind the Moon. The impulse to move arose from a divine force, external to the fabric of literature. However, about a thousand and more years later, in 1543, when he reorganized the planets, Copernicus claimed that the all-powerful sun, "as if it were sitting on a throne", and, in fact, "dominates the family of the planets". Without explicitly stating the force behind the Sun's control, Copernicus placed the planets around it in order of their speed, and placed the planet Mercury closest to the heart of the Sun because it is the fastest of them all.

Indeed, the proximity of the planet Mercury to the Sun is the decisive factor regarding this planet, not only its dizzying progress through space - the only phenomenon that can be easily observed from Earth - but also its internal contrast, its heat, its gravity, and the history of disasters that left it so small (only about a third of its diameter of the earth).

Due to the attraction of the nearby sun, the star Hema rushes in its orbit, at an average speed of 48 km per second. At this rate, almost twice the speed of the Earth, the planet Hema only needs 88 Earth days to complete its orbital journey. However, this uncompromising gravitation, which accelerates the course of the planet Hema, is also what stops its rotation on its axis. This planet rushes forward at a much higher speed than the speed at which it spins, and therefore every area of ​​it is forced to wait half a mercurial year (about six earthly weeks) from the rising of the sun to the full light of midday. Finally, evening falls only at the end of the year, and once the long night falls, another mercurial year will pass before the sun rises again. And so the years rush by and pass, while the days drag on forever.

In the dark days of the solar system, Mercury rotated on its axis, most likely, faster. It is possible that each of his days then lasted about eight hours, and it is also possible that in the fast Mercurial year there were hundreds of such days. However, the tidal movements caused by the sun in the molten center of Hema, caused its rotation to gradually fade to its slow pace.

The dawn of the planet Hema rises with white heat. This planet does not have a protective atmosphere, which can suppress the morning light and turn it into the "morning-born, rosy-fingered Eos", known from Homer's poem. The nearby sun creeps into the black sky, rising in it enormous in size, almost three times the diameter of the wheel visible from the earth. Without the mediation of the air, which disperses the sun's heat and stores it inside, in some areas of the planet Mercury the heat during the day can melt metals, and during the night - they cool to hundreds of degrees below the freezing point. Venus is indeed warmer overall, due to the thick blanket of atmospheric gases that surrounds it, and Pluto is, in short, colder, due to its distance from the Sun; But nowhere else in the solar system are temperatures more extreme than a single bend.

The sharp contrast between day and night compensates for the lack of seasonal changes in the planet Hema. This planet has no real seasons, as it stands straight and does not lean on a tilted axis, like the Earth. The light and heat always strike directly at the equator of the planet Mercury, while the north and south poles, which do not receive direct sunlight, remain cool, relatively, all the time. In fact, in the polar regions, water originating from comets that have been kept frozen in the perpetual shadow is hidden within craters of accumulated ice.

Mercury is not normally visible from Earth, but is hidden in the glow of the Sun. The planet can only be seen with the naked eye when its orbit carries it far to the east or west of the sun in the Earth's sky. In these 'elongations' (changes in the angular distance from the Sun) Mercury sometimes hovers above the horizon every morning and every evening for days or weeks. Still, it's hard to see, since the sky is relatively clear at these times, and Hema is so small and far away. Even at the peak of its proximity to the Earth, we are still separated from the planet Mercury by 80 million kilometers, quite far compared to, for example, the distance from the Moon - 400 thousand kilometers on average. Moreover, as it approaches the Earth, the bright part of the planet Mercury shrinks to just a scythe. Only the most persistent observers will be able to spot it, and only with the help of good luck. Copernicus, trapped between the terrible weather of northern Poland and the isolated nature of the planet Mercury, succeeded even less than the ancients. Thus, for example, he complains in his book 'On the Revolutions' (De Revolutionibus): "The ancients had the advantage of clearer skies; The Nile - so they say - does not emit such veiled vapors as those rising from the Vistula."

Copernicus further argues against the movement of the planet Mercury: "The planet tortured us with its many riddles and the arduous work involved in investigating its north". In the universe imagined by Copernicus, the sun is at the center, and in determining the order of the planets around it, he was based on the observations of other astronomers, both ancient and contemporaries. However, none of them saw the planet Hema often enough or accurately enough to help Copernicus establish his assumptions about its orbit, as he had hoped.

The Danish perfectionist Tycho Brahe, born in 1546, three years after the death of Copernicus, accumulated quite a few observations of the planet Mercury - at least 85 - from his astronomical castle on Ivan Island, where he designed and developed instruments for measuring the position of each planet at precisely specified times. Johann Kepler, Brahe's German partner, inherited this treasure trove of data, and in 1609 he accurately determined the orbits of all these wanderers, "and even of the planet Mercury itself."

Later, Kepler estimated that despite the difficulty of observing the planet Mercury on the horizon, he might be able to capture it high in the sky, on one of the special occasions called 'transit', in which the planet must pass the surface of the sun. Then, by projecting the image of the sun through a telescope onto paper - so he can observe it safely - he will identify the dark shape of the star Mercury moving from one end of the sun's disk to the other over the course of several hours. In 1629 Kepler predicted that such a 'Mercury transit' would occur on November 7, 1631, but he died about a year before the event. Inspired by Kepler's prediction, the Parisian astronomer Pierre Gassendi prepared to witness the transit, and then, when the event unfolded before him, more or less at the predicted time, and he alone saw it through the passing clouds, he erupted in a flood of metaphors and mythological allusions.

"This cunning Kilenius", wrote Gassandi (he calls the star after the name of the mountain Kilna in Arcadia, the birthplace of the god Mercurius), "summoned a fog to cover the earth, then appeared earlier and smaller than expected, and could pass by without being recognized and without that we will notice him. However, Apollo has been used to his tricks since his childhood [Mercury stole Apollo's herds at the dawn of his life], and he was inclined to our advantage, and did everything so that he could not leave and escape detection, even though no one noticed him when he entered. And so I was given the opportunity to hold his winged sandals for a brief moment, even during his flight. I am more fortunate than many, many of the scouts of Hermes, who searched in vain for the passage, while I saw him in a place where no one had seen him to this day, in the crown of Phoebus, sparkling with the brilliance of the lightning."

Gassendi's surprise at the early appearance of the planet Mercury - Kepler predicted that it would be discovered at noon, and it actually appeared at around nine o'clock in the morning - does not detract from Kepler's achievement, who was careful and advised the astronomers to start looking for the transit the day before, on November 6, in case he made a mistake in his calculations, and even Continue to be vigilant on November 8th. However, Gassendi's comment about the small size of the planet Hema caused a big surprise. In the official report he authored he emphasized his astonishment at the small size of the planet, and explained that he first dismissed it as a sunspot, but due to the speed of its movement he finally realized that it was none other than the winged messenger itself. Gassendi assumed that the diameter of the planet Mercury would be about 15/1 of the diameter of the Sun, as estimated by Ptolemy about 1,500 years before him. However, the transit observation revealed that Mercury is only a fraction of this estimate, less than a hundredth of the apparent width of the Sun. Thanks to the use of the telescope, combined with Gassendi's observations of the silhouette of the planet Hema against the sun, the star stripped off the hazy glow, the majestic figure that usually assumed its appearances on the horizon.

Over the next several decades, with the help of precise measuring instruments placed on improved telescopes, astronomers were able to trim the dimensions of the planet Mercury and determine them close to its known size today - about 4,900 kilometers from side to side, that is, less than 1/300 the size of the Sun.

By the end of the 17th century, the assumptions about mystical and magnetic attractions between the sun and the planets were replaced by the force of gravity, which was proposed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 in his book 'Principia Mathematica'. It would seem as if Newton's calculations and his universal law of gravitation gave astronomers control over the heavens themselves. Now it was possible to accurately calculate the position of every celestial body every hour and every day, and if the observed movements deviated from the predicted, the heavens were required to produce a new star to explain the discrepancy. Thus, in fact, Neptune was "discovered" in 1845, with pencil marks on paper, a whole year before the distant body was located through the lens of the telescope.

The astronomer who predicted the presence of Neptune in the outer fringes of the solar system then turned his attention to the more inner planet Mercury. In September 1859, Orbain G.G. Lavrier of the Paris Observatory announced with some alarm that the perihelion point (the closest point to the sun in the orbit of a celestial gram) in the orbit of the planet Mercury changes very slightly over time, instead of repeating itself in every orbit, as predicted by Newtonian mechanics. Lavrier suspected that the reason for this was a pull from another planet or a swarm of small bodies, located between the planet Mercury and the Sun. To find the appropriate name, LaVeria turned to mythology, and called his invisible world 'Vulcan', after the god of fire and blackness.

The immortal Vulcan was born crippled and walked with a limp. Le Verrier asserted that his Vulcan was accelerating in its orbit, four times faster than the planet Mercury, and passing the Sun at least twice a year. However, all attempts to observe these predicted transitions have failed.

Astronomers looked for Vulcan in the daytime sky darkening around the sun in the total solar eclipse of July 1860, and again in the eclipse of August 1869. By then, quite a bit of skepticism had developed, and after ten years of fruitless hunting expeditions, the American astronomer Christian Peters did not hesitate to comment mockingly: "I won't bother looking for the birds The mythicity of Lavria.”

"Mercurius was the god of thieves," pointedly remarked French observer Camille Palmerion. "His companion sneaks up like an unknown assassin." Despite this, the search for Vulcan continued well into the next century, and some astronomers were engaged in thoughts about its whereabouts as early as 1915, the year in which Albert Einstein announced to the Prussian Academy of Sciences that Newton's mechanics would not exist where gravity exerts its full force. In the closest vicinity of the Sun, Einstein explained, space itself is warped by the force of a massive gravitational field, and every time Mercury ventures into it, it accelerates more than Newton allowed.

"Can you imagine my happiness," Einstein asked in a letter to one of his colleagues, "that the equations of the perihelion motion of the planet Mercury are indeed correct? For several days I couldn't find words because of excitement." Following Einstein's statement, Vulcan fell from the sky, like Icarus, while the planet Hema gained renewed fame, due to the role it played in advancing cosmic understanding.

And yet, for the viewers who wanted to know what he looked like, the star of Hema caused great frustration. One German astronomer believed that a thick layer of clouds surrounded the surface of the star. In Italy, Giovanni Schiaparelli of Milan decided to follow the star high above in daylight, despite the glare of the sun, hoping to obtain a clearer distinction of its surface. Schiaparelli pointed his telescope vertically into the midday sky, instead of horizontally at sunrise or sunset, thus avoiding the stormy air of Earth's horizon and also managed to keep Mercury in his field of view for hours. He began his observations in 1881, abstaining from coffee and whiskey so as not to blur his vision, and for this reason also abstained from tobacco under oath, and watched the star from above during the entire length of its orbit. However, the paleness of the planet Hema against the background of today's sky defeated his efforts to decipher the characteristics of its surface. After eight years of grappling with the enormous task, all Schiaparelli could report were "very faint streaks, in which," he said, "we can distinguish only with the utmost effort and attention." In a rough description of Mercury, which he published in 1889, he drew these lines, including one that took the shape of the number five.

In 1934, a more detailed map was published, described as the culmination of ten years of research conducted by Eugene Antoniadi at the Médon Observatory, near Paris. Antoniadi admitted that he saw little more than Schiaparelli, but he was an excellent draughtsman and had a larger telescope at his disposal, and he rendered his faint marks with better shading, and the names he gave them fit well with the world of classical associations associated with the name of Mercurius: Cyllene (on the name of the mountain of the god's birth), Apollonia (after his half-brother, Apollo), Caduceata (after his magic staff), and the wilderness of the three-degreed Hermes (Solitudo Hermae Trismegisty). These names no longer appear on modern maps, but two prominent ridges discovered by satellite imaging are now called 'Schiapparelli' and 'Antoniadi'.

Schiaparelli and Antoniadi assumed, based on the consistency of the appearance of the shapes after long hours of observation, that only one side of the planet Mercury was exposed to view. They thought that the sun fixed the small star in a pattern where one half of its sphere is flooded with heat and light while the other half remains in constant darkness. Similarly, many of their contemporaries and most of their successors believed until the mid-60s, that in the planet Hema there is a perpetual 'day' on one side and a perpetual 'night' on the other. However, the sun determines the rotation and orbit of the planet Mercury according to a different formula: the star rotates on its axis once every 58.6 days - in accordance with the time rate of its orbit, and it completes three rotations around its axis for every two trips around the sun.

The 2:3 pattern causes viewers from Earth to repeatedly see one side of the planet Mercury in six or seven successive appearances. Schiaparelli and Antoniadi did look at the unchanging face of the planet Mercury throughout their studies, so their erroneous conclusion about its rotation can be excused, since the behavior of the star corresponded well to their mistake.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the planet Hema continued to be a difficult target. Even the 'Hubble' space telescope, orbiting above the Earth's atmosphere, has avoided looking at the planet Mercury, for fear of pointing its delicate optics too close to the Sun, and so far only one spacecraft has stood up to the hostile heat and radiation of its immediate environment.

Mariner 10, Earth's mission to Mercury, flew by twice in 1974 and again in 1975. It transmitted thousands of images and measurements of a landscape riddled with craters, small sediments and huge basins. The dark or light paths left by the shards marked the places where new attacks had turned the face of the old. The lava that flowed over the scars left by the collisions smoothed out some of the depressions, but in general, the poor and battered planet Hema clearly preserved the remains of the period - which ended almost four billion years ago - when the fragments of the remains from the creation of the solar system threatened the soft planets.

The most violent attack on the planet Hema left a wound 1,300 kilometers wide, known as the Caloris basin ('the basin of heat'). The mountains that are about a kilometer high on the edge of Kaluris jumped, most likely as a result of the massive explosion that dug the basin, and around the mountains on all sides more signs of commotion were discovered, in ridges and rough ground, hitting waves for hundreds of kilometers. The collision with Cloris also sent shock waves through the interior of a hot, compressed, metallic star, triggering earthquakes that lifted the crust on the far side of this world and sliced ​​it apart.

Photomontage images from Mariner 10, which captured less than half of the face of the planet Hema, revealed a network of slopes and fault lines, suggesting that the entire planet shrunk to its current dimensions from some larger beginning. As the interior of the planet Mercury contracted, the global crust adjusted itself to the world, which suddenly became smaller, like some secret trick of the ever-disguising god Mercurius.

After 30 years without a scientific investigation, a new spacecraft, 'MESSENGER' (an acronym for the words Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) is now on its way to Mercury. The spacecraft, which was launched in August 2004, despite the name given to it, is not capable of flying quickly and directly, and it will only come close to Hema in January 2008. From the first encounter with the star, Messenger will begin a detailed mapping effort, which requires three flights over Hema over the next three years. And at the same time it attacks the sun, protected by a parasol made of ceramic fabric. So, in March 2011, Messenger will maneuver itself into orbit around the planet Mercury itself, for a journey that will last a full year (in Earth time), to monitor the planet during two of its longest days. 'Messenger', which will rapidly attack the planet Hema repeatedly every 12 hours, will act as a new oracle, pouring out answers to questions raised by eager truth seekers from Earth.

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