ASTRO-110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Orbital Eccentricity, Kuiper Belt
18 Sep 2020
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Document Summary
The history of the discovery of the minor planets is a peculiar and interesting one. Below is a table of the planets and their distances from the sun in astronomical units (i. e. , the distance earth-sun = 1 au). As early an astronomer as kepler was uneasy about the large gap between mars and. Jupiter and felt that there was something missing there. This gap fascinated astronomers of the 18th century and many felt that there should be something there. Day of 1801 the italian astronomer piazzi found it - a small planet about 600 km in diameter which he called ceres. In the following illustration you can see how minor this largest of the minor planets is. This first discovery was followed by many others in the years up to the present, and today there are thousands of known minor planets in the so-called "asteroid belt".
