By Stuart Ross Taylor
This fascinating travel of our Universe explores our present wisdom of exoplanets and the quest for an additional Earth-like planet. starting with the fundamental strategies of planet formation and the composition of the Universe, Stuart Ross Taylor summarises our wisdom of exoplanets, how they examine with our planets and why a few stars have greater liveable zones. additional sections supply a close learn of our sun procedure, as a foundation for realizing exoplanetary structures, and a close learn of the Earth as our in simple terms present instance of a liveable planet. The booklet concludes with a philosophical and ancient dialogue of subject matters surrounding planets and the advance of existence, together with why our probabilities of discovering extraterrestrial beings on exoplanets is especially low. this is often a fascinating and informative learn for an individual attracted to planetary formation and the exploration of our Universe.
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Extra info for Destiny or chance revisited : planets and their place in the cosmos
Example text
His birth and death dates are unknown, although Arab sources recorded that he lived for 78 years. Nevertheless, in spite of his great reputation, Ptolemy remains an obscure figure. It is not clear how reliable his measurements were, particularly since he worked for the state religion, which was heavily concerned with astrology. He seems to have been endowed with bad judgment, since he rejected both the Sun-centered solar system of Aristarchus and the essentially correct value for the size of the Earth that Eratosthenes had worked out.
This was in contrast to the ideas of Newton, who had apparently believed that the solar system had been created in its present form only a few thousand years earlier. prologue 23 figure 2 Laplace Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749–1827). Laplace, however, was an inhabitant of the Age of Enlightenment. Born into what we would now call a middle-class farming family, he had survived the French Revolution and was a distinguished member of the French scientific establishment at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Laplace was impressed, as Newton had been earlier, with the regularities in the solar system as it was known in the late eighteenth century. The planets all lay in a plane, and they all moved in the same anticlockwise direction around the Sun. The satellites revolved around their parent planets in the same direction. Laplace ignored the inconvenient fact that at least two satellites of Uranus, discovered by William Herschel (1738–1822) in 1787, were orbiting in a plane perpendicular to the rest of the solar system.