What is the Planet Vulcan?

Before Neptune was observed in 1860, French mathematicians Levier and Adams had predicted its location. This accurate prediction indicates that the deviation of Mercury's motion may be caused by Mercury's internal planet or the existence of a second asteroid belt in Mercury's orbit. These can only be observed when they pass by the sun or during a total solar eclipse. Prof. Wolf at the Solar Data Center in Zurich had seen some suspicious dots in the sun, and another astronomer had seen something similar. There are twenty-four points in total, which seem to match Mercury's internal planetary orbits very well. One runs for 26 days and the other for 38 days.

Vulcan planet

Right!

In 1860

Astronomers are a wonderful group of people, some like naming, some like numbers and letters. Astronomers studying the solar system belong to the former camp. Since each planet, asteroid, moon, mountain, and crater has its own name, human myths have been searched. As a result, those rocky planets that need to be identified have to be crowned "Zappafrank", Lennon (Lennon ), McCartney, and even bizarre names like Bagehot. Scientists studying other planetary systems are subject to more naming restrictions. Planets that belong to stars other than the sun only get the name of the star, plus a suffix letter. Even if they circle around Alpha Centauri, they won't get such starry nicknames as Polyphemus and Pandora in Avatar. They are just some of the accompanying letters, and they are also lowercase letters.

This is really tragedy too. Although the names of the stars of the solar system stand out, the carefully selected names can be cited for classics, which are interesting and memorable. So maybe it's time to change the interstellar naming convention and it's time to give the planets outside the solar system a good name. Now, there happens to be an ideal planet-it is in line with astronomy's own myth: a legend about a planet that never existed: Vulcan.

The planet, now named Kepler-10b, is the latest discovery of the American spacecraft Kepler. The American Astronomical Society announced its existence at the Seattle meeting on January 10. The smallest planet currently found in the outer galaxy of the solar system has caused excited attention: its diameter is only 1.4 times that of Earth, but it weighs 4.6 times that of Earth. It is called "Vulcan" because it orbits its star (Kepler-10) once every 20 hours with a trajectory equivalent to 1/20 of Mercury's trajectory.

Nineteenth-century astronomers spent decades searching for a planet in Mercury's orbit and confidently named it the Roman god of fire-loving blacksmith (Vulcan) before finding it. They think that there is a reason for "Vulcan" because Mercury's trajectory appears to be pulled by a planet closer to the inner planet.

This difference was finally explained by Einstein's relative gravitational effect of the sun, so the search for "Vulcan" gradually faded. However, the curiosity of Kepler -10b is similar to the search for near-core planets that did not exist in the solar system. First, the location of the new planet is very close to its star, and second, it is small but quite heavy. If Mars was found that year, that star would also have this useful feature. Third, the high weight value of Nova may mean that it is composed of iron, which is suitable to be named after Vulcan and is a blacksmith. Fourth, it was discovered in the same way that it was looking for Vulcan in the past-when it flew in front of its "parent" star, the key that caused the star's slightly dimmed brightness was captured.

It is true that numbers occupy an important place in the field of science, and science is based on numbers. But the romantic ideals that drive the practice of science are far beyond what many non-scientists can realize-the search for other planets and the attractiveness of other life forms on those planets is the ultimate of this romantic ideal.

Then keep the numbers in their proper places-for calculating objects. If the object is described, it is better known. When you open the space map and start naming a new planet, what else is better than naming a new planet with a magical blacksmith "Vulcan" who has married the goddess Venus but has been hated by the god Mars? How about it?

In 1859, Lewyer received a letter from an astronomy amateur named Lescarbault, stating that he observed a black dot on the sun on March 26, 1859, which appeared to be a planet Through the sun's surface. He saw that the black spot moved an equivalent of a quarter of the diameter of the sun in an hour and a quarter of an hour. Lescarbault estimates that its orbital inclination is between 5.3 and 7.3 degrees, its longitude at the center point is about 183 degrees, its eccentricity is "very large", and its time to pass the sun is four hours and thirty minutes. Levier studied this observation and calculated that its rotation period is 19 days and 7 hours, the distance from the sun is 0.1427 astronomical units, the inclination is 12 degrees 10 minutes, and the center point is 12 degrees 59 minutes. Its diameter is smaller than Mercury, and its mass is about one-seventh of Mercury. It is too small to calculate the deviation of its orbit from Mercury's orbit, but perhaps this is the largest of the asteroid belts within Mercury. Levier devoted all his energy to this black spot and named it Vulcan.

A total solar eclipse occurred in 1860. Levier mobilized all French and other astronomers to find Vulcan, but no one found it. Lewyer became more inclined to explain Wolf's "sunspots", and this speculation gained more powerful evidence before Leweyer's death in 1877. On April 4, 1875, a German astronomer H. Weber saw a dot on the sun. It is worth noting that Levier's calculations indicate that Vulcan may pass on April 3 of that year, and Wolf discovered that a planet with a period of 38 days may also appear at that time. This "dot" was filmed at the observatories in Greenwich and Madrid.

After the solar eclipse on July 29, 1878, there was also a commotion. Two observers claimed to see a small bright disc-shaped object near the sun, and this object could only be in orbit of Mercury. Asteroids: JC Watson (Professor of Astronomy, University of Michigan) is convinced that two Mercury's inner planets have been discovered! Lewis Swift (the discoverer of Comet Swift-Tuttle who returned in 1992) also thinks he saw that star as Vulcan. But the position of the star he saw was completely different from that seen by Watson. In addition, neither what Watson or Swift saw was in line with Levier or Lescarbault's description of Vulcan.

Since then, although astronomers have tried hard to observe during the total solar eclipse, they have never seen Vulcan again. In 1916, Einstein published "General Relativity". The reason for the deviation of Mercury's orbit was explained without relying on the introduction of unknown planets inside Mercury. (According to the general theory of relativity, the mass produces a gravitational field. Strong, the gravitational field is also a kind of mass. This mass produces a smaller gravitational field, which causes deviations in Mercury's orbit. Similar to the divergence of electromagnetic waves, the electric and magnetic fields transform each other. In May 1929, Potsdamian Erwin Freundlich took pictures of the entire solar eclipse, and studied them carefully, and then took a picture of the surrounding sun six months later, and found that there was no brighter than the ninth star near the sun Celestial body.

But what did people see in the past? It is impossible for Lescarbault to make up a "fairy tale", nor can Lewyer believe him unreasonably. Perhaps Lescarbault happened to see an asteroid in orbit around the earth, which was very close to the earth, and that asteroid was not known at the time, so the only explanation that led to Lescarbault was that it was Mercury Orbiting planets. As for Swift and Watson, they may be in a hurry to observe and mistakenly recognize some stars as Vulcan.

From 1970 to 1971, "Vulcan" was raised again because some observers believed that they detected some faint light near the sun during a total solar eclipse. But this may also be just some dim comets. Later, people did see these comets, and they hit the sun because their orbits were too close to the sun.