Vulcan | The Planet That Didn't Exist

in 2006 the international astronomical union voted to redefine what we call a planet and in doing so famously pluto was moved from planet to dwarf planet and nobody minded of course reclassifications like that are nothing new ancient people staring at the sky using only puny human eyes had very little idea of what was actually going on so since then most things have been reshuffled once or twice as we've been figuring things out originally the sun and the moon were planets because planets used to mean objects that wandered across the sky when we came to know more about them it became increasingly nonsensical to have these objects in the same group so the sun moved to become a sun and the moon became a moon i'm surprised it took long to figure that one out to be honest even the whole pluto debate has happened before when we discovered ceres we initially thought it might be a planet until we found more and more and more and it became clear it's probably best to treat them as their own thing so it is worth noting for those a little saddened by pluto's lost planet hood that becoming king of the dwarves is actually pretty great as things go because if we really want to talk about crushing the motions it could have been a lot worse there is a planet that has been demoted from existence itself this is the story of vulcan the rise and the fall of the planet that never even existed first before we get to all of this which is coming we just need to lay down a small bit of context and to do that we need to talk about modeling the solar system with maths yeah i know if that's not a reason to keep watching nothing is say you were in the 1800s and you wanted to make a mathematical model of the solar system in order to predict the motions of the planets for example well the real solar system is made of various separate objects that interact mainly via gravity by the 1800s we knew how gravity worked newton and his law seemed to be pretty spot-on whenever we tested it so it seems like it would be a pretty simple thing just to apply that six sorry seven times here and figure out how things might move right well no you'd get results sure but you'd find the further ahead you predicted the more incorrect your answers would be why because there's an asterisk or lack of asterisks on newton's law when you put in the numbers the only way you'll get no attraction at all between two objects is if one of them has zero mass you can make them as light as you want or as far apart as you want but as long as they weigh something you'll get a non-zero force of attraction what does that mean well no matter how distant or how puny two objects may be they pull on each other so every object is pulling on every other object in the universe and planets are pulling on each other and the sun and being pulled on by hundreds of thousands of other bodies and yeah things get messy quite quickly even if you ignore everything but the reasonably important objects you still see some weird behaviors just from the planets pulling on each other and if you don't factor those in if you ignore what might be inconvenient to calculate well this isn't really a model of the solar system anymore is it if you want to be true to reality if you want to be able to reliably predict the solar system you have to include as much of this messiness as possible because that's what's really happening and if you were in the 1800s you would do this all by hand it sounds like it might drive a person mad why would anyone spend this much effort on a model of the solar system enter physicists turns out while it might be extremely tedious to do a mathematical model of the solar system would be really useful actually you could fast forward it to see events in the far future you wouldn't otherwise get to see you could even wind it backwards to see how it might have all formed in the first place you could even figure out if the solar system would all chaotically fall apart in the future which you know might be worth knowing if we live inside of it and most importantly it allowed physicists to avoid going outside so that's what you need to know making a model of the solar system that was accurate was tricky but also a major goal of physicists of the age and well worth devoting your life to now finally we can begin the story the story of vulcan begins with a man called oba jean josef liverier born in normandy in 1811 and initially moving to paris to study chemistry leverier fails to get a place as an assistant lecturer and so changes fields at the age of 25 to astronomy risky but it seems to work out for him as before long he's found his way into working at the paris observatory one of the most prestigious observatories in europe at the time i try to be fair to the people in these and i'm generally pretty kind if they're the protagonist of the whole thing but leverier was as a person a mixed bag to put it diplomatically one biographer calls him detestable right in the title because well he was sorry he was vain he was often arrogant rude and was by most accounts a pretty difficult person to work with and i imagine live with as well considering he used to practice violin at three in the morning but at the same time he was also fantastic at doing what was his second choice career astronomy not sure that quite evens out but he was good not just anyone ends up with their name on the eiffel tower in his new role he had quickly been drawn into the academic void left by pierre laplace who had died nearly a decade before laplace who you might have heard of before thanks to his equation or his demon had spent much of his life grappling with the motions of the planets and had built a mathematical model of the solar system his was the best yet at charting the motions of the planets but it still wasn't perfect some of the behaviors it predicted just weren't quite accurate to what was actually happening so the young la verrier is set to work improving and refining laplace's great model addressing the issues and bugs that the place had left and in doing so creating his own more comprehensive more complete and most importantly more accurate model of the solar system starting with the inner planets le verrier redoes all the calculations and in september 1839 just two years later submits his results to the academy of sciences in a paper titled on the secular variations of the orbits of the planets catchy in those mere months le verrier had done a brilliant job of explaining and solving the discrepancies that existed before in the inner solar system by far the largest error in this new model was in the motion of mercury which predicted that an upcoming transit of the planet across the sun was due to happen 16 seconds before it actually did that's not bad after a brief comet interlude in 1845 the head of the observatory asked leverie back on the case of the motions of the planets this time the outer ones and le verrier seems to find the mirror of the case with the inner planets years earlier most behaved according to newton's laws but like mercury the innermost seemed to deviate uranus the outermost also seemed to deviate according to newtonian physics this confirmed what had already been known for a while that this newly discovered planet was apparently drifting in the first two decades of the 1800s it was too far ahead of where it should be in the next decades it quickly dropped to behind where it should be at least compared to what we should expect from lavette's model this is really strange was le verrier's model wrong well that was fundamentally based on newton's law which seemed to be able to fit the motions of everything else pretty well and there was no other issues with how it was implemented so probably not but then why is uranus acting differently this was the great mystery and here le verrier has his moment he posits that uranus is acting according to newton we just don't have the full picture what if there was an unknown planet beyond uranus and unnoticed by us it would pull on the planet like everything else does in this case pulling it from the path that we had predicted could that be possible and if it was could you figure out where exactly this phantom planet would need to be in order to do that it was tricky because unlike the planets we could see we wouldn't have any idea what the phantom planet might weigh but even so le verde could still say generally in which part of the sky to look the paris observatory didn't have a telescope big enough to check if there was a planet there so in september of 1846 he wrote a letter to a friend at the berlin observatory one johan gala asking him to look for it he wrote in his letter rather confidently you will see sir that i demonstrate it is impossible to satisfy the conditions of uranus without introducing the action of a new planet thus far unknown and we are now and will be for several months in a favorable situation for the discovery i'm sure he said it in exactly that accent evidently gala agreed that there might be a good chance because the night he received the letter the 23rd of september 1846 he looked in the place le verrier has suggested and within one degree of that spot found the planet that we today call neptune with that levelier became the second person in recorded history to discover another world and he did so not with a telescope but with the stroke of his pen as you might expect he became very very famous from this and his ego was swelling nicely there was even the suggestion that it was going to be named after him leverier placing him permanently in the pantheon of the gods but that was dropped thankfully in favor of the name we know today but soon as it tends to normal life resumed for him there was still work to do at the observatory albeit after a promotion his solar system model still had discrepancies misbehaviors to iron out even after adding neptune into the mix things still weren't quite matching reality the main problem now mercury was misbehaving like uranus was but in a slightly different way it was down to one of the weird behaviors caused by considering the pull of the other planets in an ideal perfect newtonian scenario with no other planets mercury's orbit would look like this the high and the low points would stay static but once you start introducing back in the other planets things change their gravity pulls on mercury and slowly twists around the elongated orbit in a phenomenon called precession the high and the low points drift and move around and if you leave it long enough you almost form flower-like patterns each planet pulls differently and independently contributes some amount of twisting of the orbit venus is the most is closest and so contributes the highest amount and the biggest planet jupiter is also pretty influential when we add up the procession caused by each planet we should get at the end what we observe in reality and here it goes wrong in essence the issue was that these numbers did not add up we were seeing more procession than we calculated should be happening because of the pull of the other planets or to put it another way there was something else contributing that we had missed out the discrepancy was tiny over a century we'd expect the extra procession to amount to 43 arc seconds of drift equaling about 1 80th of a degree around the sun not much but still significant when you realize that a century isn't that long on planetary time scales and these extra amounts can add up really quickly so what to do for some viewers it surely seems a bit like deja vu didn't we just do all of this we just went through a situation with mysterious planetary drift and mysterious forces with the same guy when there were unknown forces acting on things pulling them from where they should be they turned out just to be normal forces produced by things we didn't know about yet could that be happening again it's a fair question and one leveriae soon started asking as well amongst other ways to solve the problem it could be that the amount of procession each planet caused was somehow off and that the calculation was wrong but assuming an error there quickly led back to newton and his theory that all this had been based off it could be that venus was slightly heavier than we'd expected so pulling a little harder to make up the discrepancy well sure but this would go for all of venus's interactions not just with mercury and we'd be able to see that effect on earth could the inverse square law actually be something like this but but why once again he found himself back at a familiar hypothesis a planet or if one prefers a group of smaller planets circling in the vicinity of mercury's orbit would be capable of producing the anomalous perturbation felt by the latter planet the disturbing mass if it exists would hardly have a sensible effect on the motion of the earth we don't know whether it would have any effect on venus but we can at least allow that the effect on venus would be much weaker than exerted on mercury it seemed to work it fixes mercury but doesn't meddle much with the rest of them and it was another planet a second one for leverie with some further mathematical calculations he quickly deduced that to make up the discrepancy the unknown mass would have to orbit inside the orbit of mercury extremely close to the sun but this might actually explain why it had never been seen if it hugged the sun so closely it would be hidden by the glare when the sun set so did it it never appeared in the night sky to be seen it was a brilliant hypothesis with one flaw wouldn't it be unlikely that a heavenly body found so close to the sun could escape detection during a total solar eclipse or wouldn't such an object sometimes pass between the sun and the earth and wouldn't it then betray itself such a planet would surely sometimes transit the sun and it would then be observable if not obvious leveria himself seemed to think that this was the fatal flaw in the hypothesis and instead used a workaround he posited that many many smaller bodies existed instead like a close-in asteroid belt that could combine have the gravitational pull needed while still being small enough individually to evade detection clever leverier published these hypotheses on the 12th of september 1859 with a message to watch the sun very very closely did he think that he had discovered another planet probably not it was not the hypothesis he thought was most likely and then he receives a letter he was right there was something out there and someone else had beaten him to the punch in discovering it edmund modest leskobo was first and foremost a doctor he lived in a village of just a few hundred people miles away from paris and as far as france goes in the middle of nowhere modest is literally in his name but between appointments with patients les garbo indulged in what seemed to be his great hobby astronomy a few years ago in 1845 he had been taken by the idea that a planet could be hidden by the glare of the sun and so began to look for one to keep watch by 1858 he had scraped together enough to have his homemade solar telescope mounted in a dome above the doctor's surgery but still nothing until as he would later recount it was about 4pm when at a free moment between appointments go ball headed up to the observatory and took a look at the sun and he sees this and it's moving his day has finally come and it's while he's working of course he immediately writes down where it is on the face of the sun and the time before being called the way to what i imagine to be the quickest doctor's appointment in human history les garbo rushes back upstairs and takes another look it's still there and has moved significantly in less than an hour which makes it being a sunspot very unlikely he writes down this second location with its time and then watches as the mysterious circle disappears from view leskoval hadn't seen it arrive but from the speed it travelled it took about 80 minutes to graze the disk of the sun his plan after some thought was apparently to watch for a reappearance he wanted to make sure of his observation and wanted to confirm it existed when it surely swung around again but this plan was to obviously change when months later les garbo read of le verrier's paper suggesting a hidden interior planet and so the rural amateur soon found himself contacting the most famous astronomer in the world well it quickly escalated from there without warning one day leskop awoke and found possibly the most famous astronomer of the age on his doorstep apparently having immediately caught the train to meet him and eager to see with what exactly he had seen this phantom planet it is you then sir who pretend to have observed the intra-mercurial planet and who have committed the grave offense of keeping your observation secret for nine months i warn you i have come here with the intention of doing justice to your pretensions and of demonstrating either that you have been dishonest or deceived tell me then unequivocally what you have seen they say don't meet your heroes this anecdote certainly seems to back that up because le verrier metaphorically tore apart les gobold's entire hobby his method of timing things his months of silence even his bodge telescope it's scientifically the right thing to do scientific rigor making sure the times and the angles could be trusted that it wasn't just a speck on the lens or a sunspot and that his story was plausible he probably could have been a bit nicer about it though despite his best efforts there was seemingly no mistake all the maths worked out when he performed it again all the methods of timing proved to be accurate the telescope was in good working order neighbors even testified to les garbo's honesty and that he was a good man this country doctor was either seeing things or had genuinely seen a transit occur in march and despite his extreme skepticism leveria left convinced that there was indeed something out there and that this country doctor had seen it and so it was on the 2nd of january 1860 that leverier announced the discovery of his second world he had done it again as baum and sheehan put it so great was leveria's prestige that members of the academy accepted the discovery with applause and acclimation it was 1846 all over again although this time even more gratifyingly so a french astronomer had accomplished what another frenchman had predicted within a month the new planet was named vulcan after the roman god of fire appropriate for something flying so close to the sun though maybe in retrospect icarus would have been better who exactly first put forward the name is lost though it was probably not leverier who might have had another go at naming it after himself he was seemingly more interested in attributing other things to it from the information found in les garbo's one transit he could start to tease out information about this mysterious object if you assume the orbit was circular then the high speed across the face of the sun would suggest an orbit close in which leveria calculated to be about 13 million miles from the sun itself furthermore and more excitingly that 13 million mile orbit took 19 days and 17 hours to go around so we can actually start to guess when we might see a reappearance that does sound hopeful because it is it's pretty much a guess even so some began to watch for another transit despite not knowing exactly when it may happen coupled with that very slight hurdle there's also the weather and the rotation of the earth to bear in mind so even if leverier was on the ball with his prediction chances of seeing it still weren't great there is however another way to do things which proved to be more immediately fruitful we can skip the wind and the rain and even going outdoors entirely if we don't look forward to help find vulcan we go back a curious fact of astronomy is that the outer planets uranus and neptune despite being discovered quite late are still pretty visible on a good day you can see uranus with the naked eye so how did it avoid detection until 1781 were the ancient greeks blind well most of the time no they just didn't know what they were looking at both uranus and neptune turn up in astronomical logs in the decades and sometimes centuries before their discovery misidentified as stars in fact galileo one of the first to hold a telescope aloft probably spied levelier's neptune over 200 years before loverio finally calculated its existence so if sightings of the planets can be captured unknowingly in the logs like fossils we could theoretically go and try and dig some up for vulcan hadvalkin been unknowingly seen before well it seemed like it had within months potential vulcans were pouring out of the woodwork colleagues of laverie were sending him lists of suspects taken from logs of sunspots that might have actually been a misidentified transit coupled with that people even wrote in with their own past sightings that they for some reason didn't report until someone else had seen it first looking at you benjamin soon a canon emerged a great list of dates of suspiciously transit-like events dating all the way back to 1762. for vulcan enthusiasts this was the war collage thing on which to attach your string you might imagine that it would be easy to spot a pattern the transits tend to happen regularly one after the other after the other every so many days or so many months like a heartbeat and this is true ideally but as we'll come to expect vulcan has to make things trickier like mercury and also venus vulcan didn't seem to orbit at the same angle that earth does they are all slightly inclined or tilted with respect to the earth's orbit this makes things tricky for transits as to have one at all the sun the earth and the planet need to all line up a tilt can mean that the planet in question can appear to skip under or over the sun missing out the jew transit and leaving us in the dark metaphorically speaking so transits would occur on those beats but if and only if the tilt has no effect at the two points a year where the orbits cross over in venus these criteria are met only twice every so often forming pairs of transits with gaps of over a century where things refuse to line up in mercury this causes this seemingly chaotic pattern of transits in vulcan well that was the question it gives you some sense as to what astronomers had to wrangle with though on the face of it it does actually look encouraging despite the weird anecdotal nature of many of these look at the number of them vulcan seemed to be everywhere at least in hindsight but perhaps nobody put the pieces together until leveria predicted it theoretically on a similar level of optimism to that i just feigned were the papers who would run with the story great triumph in astronomical science in mission verde's splendid discovery of an intra-mercurial planet it seems pretty obvious to us in hindsight how early on this was but think about it from their point of view le verrier was a trusted source who had proved himself with the discovery of neptune which was definitely real by the way it even seemed like a bizarre repeat of the neptune discovery to them and consequently most average people reading these pages vulcan was a newly discovered planet it even started appearing in some textbooks of the time and on maps of the solar system side note this diagram featuring vulcan is displayed everywhere in other people's videos on wikipedia even in my banner but seems to predate les garbo's sighting by over a decade so not quite sure what's going on with that one anyway some media however left out the discovery or kept it as a footnote either because they were waiting for further verification or other than it exists they had nothing to write about yet we didn't know the distance from the sun or the size or the length of a vulcanian year to work this out was the job of those astronomers who had been left with this wall of dates to try and figure out what was going on one early attempt was by rodolf radar who had joined two candidate sightings in 1802 and 1819 with les kavos in 1859 to produce an estimated period of nearly 39 days double that calculated by leverier and giving another transit opportunity at the beginning of april 1860 and no show though that didn't disprove these candidates being real or this specific attempt being valid it might have just been a time when it wasn't visible from paris no matter more attempts and potential transit times were calculated and then as if taunting the astronomers vulcan reappeared to a mr lummus of manchester who was watching the sun on the 20th of march 1862. he saw a black spot moving quickly across the surface of the sun disappearing off the edge within about 40 minutes of sighting it no observation of the precisions of les garbos were made but with the help of a sketch and a colleague who also observed the spot with his telescope astronomers could estimate the total transit time and start to glean more information radar found that if you extrapolated the speed of the spot it worked out to a period of about 19.9 days around the sun remarkably close to the time le verrier estimated from les garbo's sighting jr hind also noted that the time between the two approximately 1090 days neatly divided into sections of 19.81 agreeing closely with both figures so this transit was 55 orbits after the last the discourse over the mysterious vulcan had never been so strong but the wheel was turning many astronomers were skeptical of claiming a whole new planet based on what was admittedly not that much evidence in their view people had too quickly leaped on this planet hypothesis to explain mercury perhaps something else was happening that had been overlooked perhaps one of the strongest anti-volcanists was emmanuel lie another french astronomer who had also been quick to say that the discovery of neptune had been a lucky coincidence it's almost like they didn't like each other funny that leer wrote a paper soon after levellier's 1860 announcement denouncing the whole thing he accused lascaux of fabricating parts or even perhaps all of his observations and of contradicting himself he accused the establishment in paris of being too quick to praise the famous le verrier's discovery he even claimed that at the very moment the transit of 1859 was taking place when liais himself was in brazil on a mission to measure sunspots he made an observation of the sun that overlapped with the window of time it was supposed to have been taking place and saw nothing a blank sun with no vulcan or even sunspots that could have been it his tone probably didn't do him any favors but in hindsight he was right you may be surprised but vulcan doesn't actually exist i know i'm spoiling the story but you've already been spoiled by virtue of living in the 21st century there is no inner planet beyond mercury which begs the question what exactly did people see here some sunspots undoubtedly some that are moving too fast for that are probably just faked but there are some with no easy explanations like what did les garbowsie did he make it up well it's possible but there's not much of a motive for him to do so les gabous seemed to dislike the attention he got and even refused to attend banquets held in his honor in favor of tending to his patience he seemed to hide from it all and never tried to capitalize on it when if he did it for attention surely he would have tried to exploit it that leaves the alternative that an inexperienced but well-intentioned amateur made a genuine mistake somehow he surely can't have seen a real sunspot because lie was apparently watching as well and would have torn him apart for it whatever the issue was in the end we just don't know and we probably never will this discussion could be a whole video on its own but uh we we probably need to keep going at the time obviously they didn't know yet that vulcan was definitely a ghost but one crucial piece of evidence one clue to that fact was there from the very beginning not only could you make an estimate of the speed from a transit you also get to see its size from that you can deduce the diameter of it the volume and consequently the mass of vulcan they found that it would be about 17 times less heavy than mercury and 20 times less heavy than would be needed to cause the disturbance in the first place vulcan barely filled the hole that it was brought in to explain of course this was excused in the minds of those that believed perhaps there were more planets like laverie originally thought perhaps this would also explain the unclear messy list of transit sightings they may not all be the same one this was something slightly more than a scientific hypothesis to them now they were invested and every few years 1865 1869 and into the 70s vulcan appeared to someone and that was enough to keep it alive in their heads the majority of people though slowly fell away from the idea perhaps it was the issue with the mass or the fact that it evaded professional astronomers but somehow appeared to complete amateurs slowly vulcan mania died for most people forgetting the story and that there even was a planet supposedly inside of mercury what contributed in part to this mess was the way in which astronomers tried to verify vulcan through watching for transits if a transit does occur then great but if one doesn't it doesn't really tell you that much you might have just not been looking at the right time or in the right place there's not really a definitive outcome vulcan can't really be disproven in this way what was needed was a better way to test if vulcan didn't exist a better way to prove that there was no planet there at all did something like that exist well perhaps and we've already mentioned it it's an eclipse when every so often the moon moves in front of and blocks out the sun the glare which had hidden vulcan from our view would be gone the curtain would be stripped back and astronomers would just have to simply look and see if the planet existed or not unlike transits using total eclipses left vulcan believers with few good excuses if one did not appear the chances it was hiding behind or in front of the sun at that very moment were very very slim the drawback of course is that total eclipses are a lot rarer in comparison happening only every few years in the 10 years since the sighting of vulcan by les garbo five total eclipses had occurred distributed all over the world from argentina to indonesia to angola only one serious attempt had been made to study a total eclipse with vulcan in mind the total eclipse of july 1860. it had run through canada spain and then libya which were relatively easy to get to in the 1800s it had not produced a result but this was in the midst of a great wave of vulcan mania so it had counted for very little now over a decade later it was felt time to try and definitively put an end to the years of speculation the next eclipse that was convenient enough to observe was to happen in 1878 and span the continental united states which was fantastic actually there were potentially hundreds of people with telescopes living in this region that could get involved with the search without having to travel at all in the meantime though believers had been doing much the same thing that they'd been doing a decade earlier trying to connect the dots and find periods that explained some of these and then using that to try and predict upcoming transits you might expect leverier the originator of all of this to be quite involved with it but mostly not leveria had spent a large portion of the decade doing other projects and dealing with other things amongst the backdrop of an increasingly chaotic france he had been forced to resign his directorship of the observatory after an internal rebellion against him but had managed to claw it back two years later when his successor and rival charles delaney drowned in mysterious circumstances let's not think about that one too hard but among his other great projects he still managed to find time to address that great mystery the aging astronomer drew up a list of five sightings five instances that he deemed could be trusted and that could be connected up with a period of roughly 33 days this could be used to predict the next one perhaps in october 1876 but when that window returned no sightings leverier did not give up saying publicly that we should be able to see it soon but he would never live to see it as on the 23rd of september 1877 31 years to the day after the discovery of neptune herba john jose flaveriae died he was 66. though he had achieved one last thing actually in dying leveria had resurrected interest in vulcan after failed attempts at pinning down a transit he has stated that the upcoming 1878 eclipse would be a great chance to definitively observe his planet 1878 would be the last total eclipse in the us that century and in this last great opportunity here was the chance to prove the great astronomer right from beyond the grave if nothing else what a sensation that would be what a story and so vulcan mania was back as well as the resurgence in popular interest there was also a surprising amount of scientists who were also interested in the existence of vulcan all these years later there were two main camps the true believers and the skeptics there were enough sightings to construct a number of plausible patterns out of them satisfying the believers but few enough to satisfy the skeptics that they were right the sightings were somehow dubious enough to totally disregard by one camp and yet also somehow blindingly obvious to the other it's easy today with a children's picture book of the solar system at hand to totally write off one camp but both sides had some pretty distinguished people on board people like james watson namesake of the watson medal a crater on the moon and discovered 22 major asteroids he was a true believer chf peters discoverer of 48 major asteroids was a skeptic and also hated watson must've been a coincidence for their last great vulcan showdown both camps made the journey out west to what was then the far reaches of the continent they set up camp and waited eager to try and settle this once and for all thanks to the advent of wireless communication people knew pretty quickly what had been seen or not seen watson quickly reported that from his position in wyoming with certainty he had seen an object inside the orbit of mercury this was backed up by louis swift in denver who had also reportedly seen something the news spread fast the papers in new york wrote of the discovery of a new planet for real this time the times reported much the same but gave away a key fact the negative results of professors newcomb wheeler holden and others who with similar instruments went over the same ground and found nothing are indeed unsatisfactory and puzzling the vast majority of observers including newcomb who was observing right alongside watson had looked and found nothing just like all the other times the skeptics were in any case quick to hit back at any positive claims with chf peters quickly publishing a report saying watson was dumb and that his methods were dumb and that it is quite apparent to every unbiased mind that his descriptions and observation were just of a nearby star theta cancry um actually he'd just created the errors in his own brain and wasn't even watching anyway so what did he know watson didn't keep up the fighting talk for long though within two years of his eclipse he was dead at the age of 42. he left behind a strong astronomical legacy and also an underground observatory which no i'm not going to explain you can't make me and with his passing the tide of opinion had well and truly turned at first it seemed that such a big claim meant that he must have seen something surely to warrant that but with time consensus formed that his observation outweighed by so many opposing accounts was a mistake that he had just seen a star instead and as that sank so did most hope that vulcan was real it had not been seen and as the author thomas levinson put it the old saw flipped absence of evidence had finally accumulated to the point where to almost everyone it had become evidence of absence vulcan did not exist barring sporadic resurgences in the papers and that one guy who tried to use it to predict the weather story for another time that was it for vulcan the end wait this can't be the end there's there's no resolution even if the planet wasn't real fine the drift of mercury certainly seemed to be real if vulcan was fictional what was causing that as we enter the 20th century it seemed like physics had run out of explanations as to what mercury was doing why it was drifting but this small discrepancy was more important than they perhaps realized with mercury's movement failing to be explained by the presence of another planet what had really happened is that a rule for describing the behavior of the universe had finally been disobeyed the same rule upon which le verrier and laplace had based their great models a rule that had been held up as true for 200 years newton's law of gravitation it was supposed to be able to predict the motions of the planets like many other things but no longer matched what the universe was actually observed doing yet because it was newton's because it had got so much else correct because it was so old people clung to it even when they had run out of excuses mercury just does that who cares if mercury was off by a few seconds it's not exactly going to revolutionize physics it's going to revolutionize physics in 1915 albert einstein released the greatest sequel in all of human history his theory of general relativity which like its predecessor sought to rethink a lot of established physics and align it with modern observations of the universe general relativity primarily tackled gravity and tried to look at it in a different more fundamental way this video is already far too long to get at what is really going on here but to oversimplify massively it represents gravity not as a field causing a force of attraction but as a consequence of geometry when an object has some mass it distorts the space and time around that object a bit like this diagram you've probably seen before when another object gets nearby it follows a straight line like you would expect but that line is in a distorted curved space so it looks to observe us like it's being drawn towards the planet boom there's our gravity the effects you get from this warped space approach is almost identical to what you'd see from newtonian physics for basically all processes on earth that you're likely to experience these approaches are equally valid but at the fringes of knowledge in the early 20th century they diverge these models disagreed in certain areas how exactly the universe behaved if you could look and observe what the universe was actually doing you could experimentally test which theory was closer to the real universe and so einstein put forward three key tests of general relativity three key places where not only did the two theories differ but that difference could be seen by us if we looked if einstein got them right and newton did not it hinted that maybe general relativity is the more accurate way to think of the universe the third dealt with light coming from a spinning object like a star the second dealt with how objects bend light around them which was demonstrated in 1919 during an eclipse and then covered by vox in this video but number one right at the top was our old friend the misbehaving mercury in newtonian mechanics as we've already discussed when you ignore the pull of all the other planets and just focus on the body and the sun the apoapsis and periapsis stay static they do not drift but when you reimagine gravity as the consequence of straight lines on curved surfaces that is not necessarily true anymore without any other interaction the orbits can still process both in this real physical example and in general relativity where the amount of procession should be calculable with this formula which gives you the amount of extra drift you might expect per orbit when you put in the numbers for mercury it gives you this which doesn't look super familiar but our tally from before was in the amount of drift per century not per orbit so when you work out what it would add up to over 100 years from laplace to einstein you get 43 arc seconds of drift per century and finally the tally adds up mercury was the only one spotted having a mysterious extra drift because it drifts so much it has a small tight and highly eccentrical bit which makes these two qualities smaller and grows the overall fraction coupled with that it's just plain easier to notice a procession when it's in eccentric orbit venus earth and every other planet turned out to have a mysterious extra drift but it's harder to notice when the orbit looks so much like a circle einstein's theory of general relativity perfectly explains why mercury was moving the way that it was which not only helped prove general relativity and ultimately overturned centuries of newtonian physics but finally solved the mystery scattering vulcan permanently to the wind case closed the former planet still haunts our system though if only you know where to look in 2013 when taking suggestions for names for the newly discovered moons of pluto the solar system's other great former planet it opened to a vote top of the list above pluto's dog and the river over which he must pass to get to pluto's realm sits the god of fire himself vulcan and the iau the organization from the beginning rejected it as an option not because it was probably driven largely by star trek fans stuff has been named after that in the past but apparently it was still another century on too closely tied to that inner planet business to reuse so much to the dismay of la verrier and also william shatner not only is there not a planet called vulcan perhaps there can't ever be one the end hey it's been a while hasn't it if you're hearing this then you made it through the video so first thing to do is to thank you for sticking with it and putting up with me for honestly far longer than you should have in more ways than one if you could then let me know what you thought of the video down below as you might expect i am a little rusty and looking for ways where i can improve and generally what people like to see in these as per usual sources are in the description if you want to look deeper as well as some vulcan book recommendations should this near feature-length video not be enough for you i've been obsessed with this topic since the beginning of the year so making this was a great way to put that to use and maybe now i can retire from translating old french documents at 3am that's everything at least that i can think of and i'll see you with any luck next time so long

Channel: Zepherus

Views: 1,034,000

Keywords: vulcan, planet, missing, le verrier, neptune, mercury, precession, missing planet, planet nine, pluto, iau, lescarbault, liais, paris observatory, vulcan planet, zepherus, explained, ghost planet, mystery, einstein, relativity, documentary, planet that didn't exist, star trek, why, was there, mercury precession, mercury drift, orbit, newton, hunt for vulcan, in search of vulcan, gravity, laplace, 1878 eclipse, orgeres, educational, the planet that didn't exist, verrier, what, how, space, 1859, 1878, eclipse

Id: iJyweEcpsGc

Length: 45min 14sec (2714 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Alulicar]

So nice to see you back!

[u/MLaaTRFanbase]

Yessss

[u/Barbourwhat]

So freaken happy you are back! Keep making videos and we will keep watching them!

[u/LNER4498]

Holy shit I thought he'd never upload again!

[u/Thepifanio]

HELL YES. Good to see some new Zepherus content.

[u/ConteCain]

oh man, that was such a good video! it was all new to me! i'm going back to rewatch your old ones, love your style, your comedic time and the fact that you pick actually weird shit to talk about. love it!