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Discovering asteroid Vesta: the story of the Celestial Police
March 10, 2021 at 11:18 am
Vesta, the brightest asteroid in our Solar System’s asteroid belt, was one of the very first asteroids to be discovered. The story of how Vesta was discovered is one full of failure, jealously and discredited theories, as all good science history should be.
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Today we know of around two million asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but 250 years ago the existence of anything at all in that area of the sky was mere speculation.
In 1766 a German astronomer and mathematician, Johann Daniel Titius formulated a mathematical law for explaining and predicting the spacing between planets in a planetary system. This is the first discredited theory we will meet in this story.