2.2 Ancient astronomy  (Page 2/12)

The writings of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the tutor of Alexander the Great, summarize many of the ideas of his day. They describe how the progression of the Moon’s phases—its apparent changing shape—results from our seeing different portions of the Moon’s sunlit hemisphere as the month goes by (see Earth, Moon, and Sky ). Aristotle also knew that the Sun has to be farther away from Earth than is the Moon because occasionally the Moon passed exactly between Earth and the Sun and hid the Sun temporarily from view. We call this a solar eclipse .

Aristotle cited convincing arguments that Earth must be round. First is the fact that as the Moon enters or emerges from Earth’s shadow during an eclipse of the Moon, the shape of the shadow seen on the Moon is always round ( [link] ). Only a spherical object always produces a round shadow. If Earth were a disk, for example, there would be some occasions when the sunlight would strike it edge-on and its shadow on the Moon would be a line.

Earth’s round shadow.

As a second argument, Aristotle explained that travelers who go south a significant distance are able to observe stars that are not visible farther north. And the height of the North Star—the star nearest the north celestial pole—decreases as a traveler moves south. On a flat Earth, everyone would see the same stars overhead. The only possible explanation is that the traveler must have moved over a curved surface on Earth, showing stars from a different angle. (See the How Do We Know Earth Is Round? feature for more ideas on proving Earth is round.)

One Greek thinker, Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 BCE), even suggested that Earth was moving around the Sun, but Aristotle and most of the ancient Greek scholars rejected this idea. One of the reasons for their conclusion was the thought that if Earth moved about the Sun, they would be observing the stars from different places along Earth’s orbit. As Earth moved along, nearby stars should shift their positions in the sky relative to more distant stars. In a similar way, we see foreground objects appear to move against a more distant background whenever we are in motion. When we ride on a train, the trees in the foreground appear to shift their position relative to distant hills as the train rolls by. Unconsciously, we use this phenomenon all of the time to estimate distances around us.

The apparent shift in the direction of an object as a result of the motion of the observer is called parallax    . We call the shift in the apparent direction of a star due to Earth’s orbital motion stellar parallax . The Greeks made dedicated efforts to observe stellar parallax, even enlisting the aid of Greek soldiers with the clearest vision, but to no avail. The brighter (and presumably nearer) stars just did not seem to shift as the Greeks observed them in the spring and then again in the fall (when Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun).