Ceres (dwarf Planet) - Discovery

Discovery

The idea that an undiscovered planet could exist between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was suggested by Johann Elert Bode in 1772. Previously, in 1596, Kepler had already noticed the gap between Mars and Jupiter. Bode's considerations were based on the Titius–Bode law, a now discredited hypothesis which had been first proposed by Johann Daniel Titius in 1766, observing that there was a regular pattern in the semi-major axes of the known planets marred only by the large gap between Mars and Jupiter. The pattern predicted that the missing planet ought to have a semi-major axis near 2.8 AU. William Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781 near the predicted distance for the next body beyond Saturn increased faith in the law of Titius and Bode, and in 1800, they sent requests to twenty-four experienced astronomers, asking that they combine their efforts and begin a methodical search for the expected planet. The group was headed by Franz Xaver von Zach, editor of the Monatliche Correspondenz. While they did not discover Ceres, they later found several large asteroids.

One of the astronomers selected for the search was Giuseppe Piazzi at the Academy of Palermo, Sicily. Before receiving his invitation to join the group, Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres on 1 January 1801. He was searching for "the 87th of the Catalogue of the Zodiacal stars of Mr la Caille", but found that "it was preceded by another". Instead of a star, Piazzi had found a moving star-like object, which he first thought was a comet. Piazzi observed Ceres a total of 24 times, the final time on 11 February 1801, when illness interrupted his observations. He announced his discovery on 24 January 1801 in letters to only two fellow astronomers, his compatriot Barnaba Oriani of Milan and Bode of Berlin. He reported it as a comet but "since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet". In April, Piazzi sent his complete observations to Oriani, Bode, and Jérôme Lalande in Paris. The information was published in the September 1801 issue of the Monatliche Correspondenz.

By this time, the apparent position of Ceres had changed (mostly due to the Earth's orbital motion), and was too close to the Sun's glare for other astronomers to confirm Piazzi's observations. Toward the end of the year, Ceres should have been visible again, but after such a long time it was difficult to predict its exact position. To recover Ceres, Carl Friedrich Gauss, then 24 years old, developed an efficient method of orbit determination. In only a few weeks, he predicted the path of Ceres and sent his results to von Zach. On 31 December 1801, von Zach and Heinrich W. M. Olbers found Ceres near the predicted position and thus recovered it.

The early observers were only able to calculate the size of Ceres to within about an order of magnitude. Herschel underestimated its size as 260 km in 1802, while in 1811 Johann Hieronymus Schröter overestimated it as 2,613 km.