Meteoric Astronomy

Автор: Daniel Kirkwood
Издательство: J.B. Lippincott & CO.
Страниц: 148
Год: 1867
Размер: 3,98 МБ

ARISTOTLE and other ancient writers regarded comets as meteors generated in the atmosphere. This opinion was generally accepted, even by the learned, until the observations of Tycho, near the close of the sixteenth century, showed those mysterious objects to be more distant than the moon, thus raising them to the dignity of celestial bodies. An achievement somewhat similar, and certainly no less interesting, was reserved for the astronomers of the nineteenth century. This was the great discovery that shooting- stars, Jire-balls, and meteoric stones, are, like comets, cosmical bodies moving in conic sections about the sun. DR. H ALLEY was the first to foretell the return of a comet, and the year 1159 will ever be known in history as that which witnessed the fulfillment of his prophecy.