Tuesday, April 27, 2010

19th Century with Planets in early 1800s

In the 19th century astronomers began to realize that recently discovered bodies that had been classified as planets for almost half a century (such as Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta) were very different from the traditional ones. These bodies shared the same region of space between Mars and Jupiter
Planets in early 1800s
Mercury Venus Earth Mars Vesta Juno Ceres Pallas Jupiter Saturn Uranus
(the Asteroid belt), and had a much smaller mass; as a result they were reclassified as "asteroids." In the absence of any formal definition, a "planet" came to be understood as any "large" body that orbited the Sun. Since there was a dramatic size gap between the asteroids and the planets, and the spate of new discoveries seemed to have ended after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, there was no apparent need to have a formal definition.[30]

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