January 1:
(GIUSEPPE PIAZZI)
In the memorable year of 1789 when the French Revolution exploded, Giuseppe Piazzi furnished his observatory in Palermo, Sicily, with new equipment. His was the southern-most observatory in Europe. From here, on 1 January 1801, while painstakingly cataloging the stars, Piazzi stumbled upon an object unrecognized by any human eye until then. He described it in Italian as la nuova stella scoperta il 1 gennaio 1801 nell ‘Osservatorio di Palermo: the new star discovered on 1 January 1801 in the Observatory of Palermo. It turned out to be the first asteroid to be observed by any human being. Piazzi named it Ceres, the patron goddess of Sicily.
As petty planetoids way out there, they are astronomical oddities, like a bunch of minute insects buzzing in the white zones of the Antarctic. Like fleas and flies, these cosmic chips are okay as long as they are far, very far away. But should they happen to come into our vicinity, we better watch out. And astronomers calmly inform us that there are about eleven asteroids whose paths lie within our earth’s orbit. These Aten asteroids (as they are called) are potential threats to our survival. Minuscule as they are in mass and size (in astronomical terms); they carry stupendous kinetic energy because of their horrendous speeds. Any encounter with them would be deadly.
The astronomer William Herschel called it an asteroid (star-like object). More exactly, it is a planetoid, for like the planets of our system it is orbiting the sun. The current technical term for it is small or minor planet. But the original etymologically inappropriate name persists in popular books and in the media.
More than a hundred thousand asteroids are whirling around the sun; the vast majority of them are in the region between Mars and Jupiter. About seven thousand of them have been individually spotted, named, and cataloged. The thousandth asteroid that was discovered (in 1923) was named Piazzia in honor of Piazzi. Other asteroids bear such names as Gaussia, Washingtonia, and Rockefellia.
Asteroids are mostly amorphous chunks of rock, from a fraction to a few miles across. It was once speculated that they are perhaps splinters from what may have once been a wholesome planet which, for some reason, was blown to smithereens. All this stony junk is now cluttering the calm void of interplanetary space, like smoke in clean air from the exhaust of a truck yet trapped by the gravitational pull of the sun. These bits of planetary debris constitute what is picturesquely described as the asteroid belt. If they are countless in number, they are also meager in mass: it is estimated that the combined mass of all asteroids will barely equal five percent of the moon.
There was an age in which, viewing the world from a different framework, our ancestors feared distant stars, planets and comets because they believed that celestial bodies control our fates and fortunes, and forebode disasters. A Latin poet put it very simply: Astra regnunt homines (The stars rule men). Recall Kent’s words in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “The stars above us govern our conditions.” The word disaster simply means bad star.
Soon after the rise of modern science, one used to laugh at such fears. Ironically, now, enriched by scientific knowledge, we have reason to be frightened once again, not by mammoth and majestic stars, but by tiny pebbles in the cosmic sea. Little did Giuseppe Piazzi realize to what fears his innocent discovery would lead us some day. We generally hear about knowledge being power. This is an instance where knowledge can be frightening.
Spurts of Thought 