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Aristarchus of Samos

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Aristarchus of Samos
Aristarchos von Samos (Denkmal).jpeg
Statue of Aristarchus of Samos at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Born c. 310 BC
Died c. 230 BC (age c.?80)
Nationality Greek
Occupation
Scholar Mathematician Astronomer
Aristarchus of Samos (?r?'st??rk?s; Greek ???sta???? ? S????, Aristarkhos ho
Samios; c. 310 c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who
presented the first known model that placed the Sun at the center of the known
universe with the Earth revolving around it (see Solar system). He was influenced
by Philolaus of Croton, but Aristarchus identified the central fire with the Sun,
and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.[1]
Like Anaxagoras before him, he suspected that the stars were just other bodies like
the Sun, albeit further away from Earth. He was also the first one to deduce the
rotation of earth on its axis. His astronomical ideas were often rejected in favor
of the incorrect geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Nicolaus Copernicus
attributed the heliocentric theory to Aristarchus.[2]

Contents [hide]
1 Heliocentrism
2 Distance to the Sun (lunar dichotomy)
3 See also
4 Notes
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
Heliocentrism[edit]
See also Heliocentrism
The original text has been lost, but a reference in Archimedes's book The Sand
Reckoner (Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli) describes a work by
Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model as an alternative
hypothesis to geocentrism. Thomas Heath gives the following English translation of
Archimedes' text[3]

You are now aware ['you' being King Gelon] that the universe is the name given by
most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth,
while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and
the centre of the earth. This is the common account (t? ??af?e?a) as you have
heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of
certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made,
that the universe is many times greater than the universe just mentioned. His
hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth
revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the
middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the
same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth
to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre
of the sphere bears to its surface.

?The Sand Reckoner


Aristarchus suspected the stars were other suns[4] that are very far away, and that
in consequence there was no observable parallax, that is, a movement of the stars
relative to each other as the Earth moves around the Sun. Since stellar parallax is
only detectable with telescopes, his accurate speculation was unprovable at the
time.
It is a common misconception that the heliocentric view was held as sacrilegious by
the contemporaries of Aristarchus.[5] Lucio Russo traces this to Gilles Mnage's
printing of a passage from Plutarch's On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon.
in which Aristarchus jokes with Cleanthes, who is head of the Stoics, a sun
worshipper, and opposed to heliocentrism.[5] In the manuscript of Plutarch's text,
Aristarchus says Cleanthes should be charged with impiety.[5] Mnage's version,
published shortly after the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, transposes an
accusative and nominative so that it is Aristarchus who is purported to be impious.
[5] The resulting misconception of an isolated and persecuted Aristarchus is still
transmitted today.[5][6]

According to Plutarch, while Aristarchus postulated heliocentrism only as a


hypothesis, Seleucus of Seleucia, a Hellenistic astronomer who lived a century
after Aristarchus, maintained it as a definite opinion and gave a demonstration of
it[7] but no full record has been found. In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder
later wondered whether errors in the predictions about the heavens could be
attributed to a displacement of the Earth from its central position.[8] Pliny[9]
and Seneca[10] referred to the retrograde motion of some planets as an apparent
(and not real) phenomenon, which is an implication of heliocentrism rather than
geocentrism. Still, no stellar parallax was observed, and Plato, Aristotle, and
Ptolemy preferred the geocentric model, which was held as true throughout the
Middle Ages.

The heliocentric theory was revived by Copernicus,[11] after which Johannes Kepler
described planetary motions with greater accuracy with his three laws. Isaac Newton
later gave a theoretical explanation based on laws of gravitational attraction and
dynamics.

Distance to the Sun (lunar dichotomy)[edit]

Aristarchus's 3rd-century BC calculations on the relative sizes of (from left) the


Sun, Earth and Moon, from a 10th-century AD Greek copy
Main article Aristarchus On the Sizes and Distances
The only known surviving work usually attributed to Aristarchus, On the Sizes and
Distances of the Sun and Moon, is based on a geocentric world view. It has
historically been read as stating that the angle subtended by the Sun's diameter is
two degrees, but Archimedes states in The Sand Reckoner that Aristarchus had a
value of degree, which is much closer to the actual average value of 32' or 0.53
degrees. The discrepancy may come from a misinterpretation of what unit of measure
was meant by a certain Greek term in the text of Aristarchus.[12]

Aristarchus claimed that at half moon (first or last quarter moon), the angle
between the Sun and Moon was 87.[13] He might have proposed 87 as a lower bound,
since gauging the lunar terminator's deviation from linearity to one degree of
accuracy is beyond the unaided human ocular limit (with that limit being about
three degrees of accuracy). Aristarchus is known to have also studied light and
vision.[14]

Using correct geometry, but the insufficiently accurate 87 datum, Aristarchus


concluded that the Sun was between 18 and 20 times farther away than the Moon.[15]
(The true value of this angle is close to 89 50', and the Sun's distance is
actually about 400 times that of the Moon.) The implicit false solar parallax of
slightly under three degrees was used by astronomers up to and including Tycho
Brahe, c. AD 1600. Aristarchus pointed out that the Moon and Sun have nearly equal
apparent angular sizes, and therefore their diameters must be in proportion to
their distances from Earth; thus, the diameter of the Sun was calculated to be
between 18 and 20 times the diameter of the Moon.[16]

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