Chasing Venus - The Race to Measure the Heavens

Zusatztext 45749910 Informationen zum Autor ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of The Brother Gardeners , long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and winner of the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award, and of Founding Gardeners ; she is also the coauthor (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History . She has written for The Sunday Times , Financial Times , The Wall Street Journal , and Los Angeles Times , and she reviews for several newspapers, including The New York Times , The Guardian , and The Times Literary Supplement . Klappentext On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system-but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Chasing Venus brings to life the personalities of the astronomers who embarked upon this complex and essential venture and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, the rivalries, and the volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.   Prologue The Gauntlet   The Ancient Babylonians called her Ishtar, to the Greeks she was Aphrodite and to the Romans Venus – goddess of love, fertility, and beauty. She is the brightest star in the night sky and visible even on a clear day. Some saw her as the harbinger of morning and evening, of new seasons or portentous times. She reigns as the ‘Morning Star’ or the ‘Bringer of Light’ for 260 days, and then disappears to rise again as the ‘Evening Star’ and the ‘Bringer of Dawn’.   Venus has inspired people for centuries, but in the 1760s astronomers believed that the planet held the answer to one of the biggest questions in science – she was the key to under­standing the size of the solar system.   In 1716 British astronomer Edmond Halley published a ten-page essay which called upon scientists to unite in a project spanning the entire globe – one that would change the world of science forever. On 6 June 1761, Halley predicted, Venus would traverse the face of the sun – for a few hours the bright star would appear as a perfectly black circle. He believed that measuring the exact time and duration of this rare celestial encounter would provide the data that astrono­mers needed in order to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun.   The only problem was that the so-called transit of Venus is one of the rarest predictable astronomical events. Transits always arrive in pairs – eight years apart – but with an interval of more than a century before they are then seen again. Only once before, Halley said, in 1639, had an astronomer called Jeremiah Horrocks observed the event. The next pair would occur in 1761 and 1769 – and then again in 1874 and 1882.   Halley was sixty years old when he wrote his essay and knew that he would not live to see the transit (unless he reached the age of 104), but he wanted to ensure that the next generation would be fully prepared. Writing in the journal of the Royal Society, the most important sc...

Product details

• Authors: Andrea Wulf
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.02.2013
• EAN: 9780307744609
• ISBN: 978-0-307-74460-9
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 19 mm
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Physics, astronomy > Astronomy; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous