Expert Voices

Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece

Earth and Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft.
Earth and Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Gareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science, University of Birmingham and Ian Whittaker, Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University

The Histories by Herodotus (484BC to 425BC) offers a remarkable window into the world as it was known to the ancient Greeks in the mid fifth century BC. Almost as interesting as what they knew, however, is what they did not know. This sets the baseline for the remarkable advances in their understanding over the next few centuries – simply relying on what they could observe with their own eyes.

Herodotus claimed that Africa was surrounded almost entirely by sea. How did he know this? He recounts the story of Phoenician sailors who were dispatched by King Neco II of Egypt (about 600BC), to sail around continental Africa, in a clockwise fashion, starting in the Red Sea. This story, if true, recounts the earliest known circumnavigation of Africa, but also contains an interesting insight into the astronomical knowledge of the ancient world.

The voyage took several years. Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, and following a westerly course, the sailors observed the Sun as being on their right hand side, above the northern horizon. This observation simply did not make sense at the time because they didn’t yet know that the Earth has a spherical shape, and that there is a southern hemisphere.

1. The planets orbit the sun

A few centuries later, there had been a lot of progress. Aristarchus of Samos (310BC to 230BC) argued that the Sun was the “central fire” of the cosmos and he placed all of the then known planets in their correct order of distance around it. This is the earliest known heliocentric theory of the solar system.

Unfortunately, the original text in which he makes this argument has been lost to history, so we cannot know for certain how he worked it out. Aristarchus knew the Sun was much bigger than the Earth or the Moon, and he may have surmised that it should therefore have the central position in the solar system.

Nevertheless it is a jawdropping finding, especially when you consider that it wasn’t rediscovered until the 16th century, by Nicolaus Copernicus, who even acknowledged Aristarchus during the development of his own work.

2. The size of the moon

One of Aristarchus’ books that did survive is about the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon. In this remarkable treatise, Aristarchus laid out the earliest known attempted calculations of the relative sizes and distances to the Sun and Moon.

It had long been observed that the Sun and Moon appeared to be of the same apparent size in the sky, and that the Sun was further away. They realised this from solar eclipses, caused by the Moon passing in front of the Sun at a certain distance from Earth.

Also, at the instant when the Moon is at first or third quarter, Aristarchus reasoned that the Sun, Earth, and Moon would form a right-angled triangle.

As Pythagoras had determined how the lengths of triangle’s sides were related a couple of centuries earlier, Aristarchus used the triangle to estimate that the distance to the Sun was between 18 and 20 times the distance to the Moon. He also estimated that the size of the Moon was approximately one-third that of Earth, based on careful timing of lunar eclipses.

A 10th century reproduction of a diagram by Aristarchus showing some of the geometry he used in his calculations. (Image credit: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

While his estimated distance to the Sun was too low (the actual ratio is 390), on account of the lack of telescopic precision available at the time, the value for the ratio of the size of the Earth to the Moon is surprisingly accurate (the Moon has a diameter 0.27 times that of Earth).

Today, we know the size and distance to the moon accurately by a variety of means, including precise telescopes, radar observations and laser reflectors left on the surface by Apollo astronauts.

3. The Earth's circumference

Eratosthenes (276BC to 195 BC) was chief librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria, and a keen experimentalist. Among his many achievements was the earliest known calculation of the circumference of the Earth. Pythagoras is generally regarded as the earliest proponent of a spherical Earth, although apparently not its size. Eratosthenes’ famous and yet simple method relied on measuring the different lengths of shadows cast by poles stuck vertically into the ground, at midday on the summer solstice, at different latitudes.

The Sun is sufficiently far away that, wherever its rays arrive at Earth, they are effectively parallel, as had previously been shown by Aristarchus. So the difference in the shadows demonstrated how much the Earth’s surface curved. Eratosthenes used this to estimate the Earth’s circumference as approximately 40,000km. This is within a couple of percent of the actual value, as established by modern geodesy (the science of the Earth’s shape).

Later, another scientist called Posidonius (135BC to 51BC) used a slightly different method and arrived at almost exactly the same answer. Posidonius lived on the island of Rhodes for much of his life. There he observed the bright star Canopus would lie very close to the horizon. However, when in Alexandria, in Egypt, he noted Canopus would ascend to some 7.5 degrees above the horizon.

Given that 7.5 degrees is 1/48th of a circle, he multiplied the distance from Rhodes to Alexandria by 48, and arrived at a value also of approximately 40,000km.

4. The first astronomical calculator

The world’s oldest surviving mechanical calculator is the Antikythera Mechanism. The amazing device was discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900.

The device is now fragmented by the passage of time, but when intact it would have appeared as a box housing dozens of finely machined bronze gear wheels. When manually rotated by a handle, the gears span dials on the exterior showing the phases of the Moon, the timing of lunar eclipses, and the positions of the five planets then known (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) at different times of the year. This even accounted for their retrograde motion – an illusionary change in the movement of planets through the sky.

We don’t know who built it, but it dates to some time between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, and may even have been the work of Archimedes. Gearing technology with the sophistication of the Antikythera mechanism was not seen again for a thousand years.

Sadly, the vast majority of these works were lost to history and our scientific awakening was delayed by millennia. As a tool for introducing scientific measurement, the techniques of Eratosthenes are relatively easy to perform and require no special equipment, allowing those just beginning their interest in science to understand by doing, experimenting and, ultimately, following in the foot steps some of the first scientists.

One can but speculate where our civilisation might be now if this ancient science had continued unabated.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Astro
    Well if you take into account that much of the Greek history has been disputed by historians worlwide because of no evidence for a lot of claims, and knowing that the Greeks were caught multiple times smuggling artifacts from around the Mediterranean claiming they were excavated in Greece, i am not trusting this post much.

    If the Greeks knew th Solar system was heliocentric, that knowledge would be popular at least in Europe and at least accepted by the Greek Orthodoxy. Holding facts in hands, i would say there is a pretty big chance that these "discoveries" are falsified and smuggled in the history books these last 100 years.
    Reply
  • rod
    FYI, it is always good to look into how many extant texts exist with Greek astronomy referenced and the earliest dates for those documents. Claudius Ptolemy recorded much in his writings near 150 A.D. and this work was used throughout the time of Tycho Brahe until Copernicus became more popular and Galileo used the telescope to show small lights moved around Jupiter. Concerning the heliocentric solar system, Philo about 50 A.D. mentioned this too in his writings. He was providing an allegorical interpretation of Genesis 2 where the Tree of Life could be like the Sun and the planets arranged around it but others considered the Earth was the center. So Philo near 50 A.D. understood that there was a heliocentric solar system view but also the geocentric teaching was the most popular it seems. We have these records well documented, ref. The Works of Philo of Alexandria.
    Reply
  • Lovethrust
    Astro said:
    Well if you take into account that much of the Greek history has been disputed by historians worlwide because of no evidence for a lot of claims, and knowing that the Greeks were caught multiple times smuggling artifacts from around the Mediterranean claiming they were excavated in Greece, i am not trusting this post much.

    If the Greeks knew th Solar system was heliocentric, that knowledge would be popular at least in Europe and at least accepted by the Greek Orthodoxy. Holding facts in hands, i would say there is a pretty big chance that these "discoveries" are falsified and smuggled in the history books these last 100 years.

    The Greeks in general did not believe in a heliocentric universe but Aristarchus and a few others did. While his writing on it may not have survived Archimedes wrote about it in the third century bc so this is no hoax, modern or otherwise. Nobody contests the genuineness of his work...

    “Unfortunately, Aristarchus works where the heliocentric model is presented are lost. His theories on the universe have been pieced together from later works and references. One of the most important and clear is the one mentioned by Archimedes in his book The Sand Reckoner:

    ‘universe’ is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere whose centre is the centre of the Earth and whose radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the Sun and the centre of the Earth. But Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, in which the premises lead to the result that the universe is many times greater than that now so called. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the Earth revolves about the Sun in 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.
    https://www.ancient.eu/Archimedes/
    Reply