Everything about Giuseppe Piazzi totally explained
Giuseppe Piazzi (
July 7 1746 -
July 22 1826) was an
Italian Theatine monk,
mathematician, and
astronomer. He was born in
Ponte in Valtellina, and died in
Naples. He established an observatory at
Palermo, now the
Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo "Giuseppe S. Vaiana".
On
January 1,
1801, Piazzi discovered a stellar object that moved against the background of
stars. At first he thought it was a fixed star, but once he noticed that it moved, he became convinced it was a planet, or as he called it, "a new star".
In his journal, he wrote: "The light was a little faint, and of the colour of
Jupiter, but similar to many others which generally are reckoned of the eighth
magnitude. Therefore I'd no doubt of its being any other than a fixed star. In the evening of the second I repeated my observations, and having found that it didn't correspond either in time or in distance from the zenith with the former observation, I began to entertain some doubts of its accuracy. I conceived afterwards a great suspicion that it might be a new star. The evening of the third, my suspicion was converted into certainty, being assured it wasn't a fixed star. Nevertheless before I made it known, I waited till the evening of the fourth, when I'd the satisfaction to see it had moved at the same rate as on the preceding days."
In spite of his assumption that it was a planet, he took the conservative route and announced it as a
comet. In a letter to astronomer
Barnaba Oriani of
Milan he made his suspicions known in writing:
» "I have announced this star as a comet, but since it isn't accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, 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. But I've been careful not to advance this supposition to the public."
He wasn't able to observe it long enough as it was soon lost in the glare of the
Sun. Unable to compute its
orbit with existing methods, the renowned mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss developed a new method of orbit calculation that allowed astronomers to locate it again. After its orbit was better determined, it was clear that Piazzi's assumption was correct and this object wasn't a comet but more like a small
planet. Coincidentally, it was also almost exactly where the
Titius-Bode law predicted a planet would be.
Piazzi named it "Ceres Ferdinandea", after the
Roman and Sicilian
goddess of grain and
King Ferdinand IV of
Naples and
Sicily. The Ferdinandea part was later dropped for political reasons.
Ceres turned out to be the first, and largest, of the
asteroids existing within the
Asteroid Belt. However, under the terms of a 2006
IAU resolution, Ceres can be called a
dwarf planet.
In
1923, the 1000th asteroid to be numbered was named
1000 Piazzia in his honor. More recently, a large
albedo feature, probably a
crater, imaged by the
Hubble Space Telescope on Ceres, has been informally named '
Piazzi'.
References
Further Information
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