The System Of Minor Planets

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Asteroids; Or Minor Planets Between Mars and Jupiter" by Daniel Kirkwood. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

According to a long-standing astronomical tradition, the naming of minor planets in the solar system is the privilege of the discoverers. Contrary to most other kinds of celestial objects which receive complex alpha-numerical designations, the names of minor planets often say more about the discoverers than about the object in question. There is a rich and colourful variety of ingenious names, from those of heavenly goddesses in the nineteenth century, to the more prosaic and sometimes very specific names of observatories, towns and mountains, computers and persons, given by present-day discoverers. Commission 20 of the International Astronomical Union, under whose auspices the naming of minor planets falls, has long been concerned with the need to establish a complete catalogue of these names, as well as of the interpretation of their meanings. For this purpose, a Study Group on the Origin of Minor Planet Names was set up at the time of the IAU General Assembly in Baltimore in August 1988. The Working Group immediately started to collect information about these matters from all available sources, including some earlier, incomplete compilations made in the U.S. and in Europe, and also by personal interaction with living discoverers of minor planets.

This stunning astronomy book explores Dwarf Planets and Asteroids: Minor Bodies of the Solar System. Written by a retired astronomer, the book provides a survey of the dwarf planets and asteroids, giving details of the discovery, naming, orbits, and physical characteristics of hundreds of examples of the known asteroids found by astronomers in the past two centuries. It also includes the different groups and classes of asteroids. Those bodies that have been visited by spacecraft are singled out for extra attention, including close-up photos where available. About two hundred asteroids have been found to have moons of their own, and the story of their discovery and examples of these moons are also included.

Excerpt from The Asteroids, or Minor Planets Between Mars and Jupiter The rapid progress of discovery in the zone of minor planets, the anomalous forms and positions of their orbits, the small size as well as the great number of these telescopic bodies, and their peculiar relations to Jupiter, the massive planet next exterior, - all entitle this part of the system to more particular consideration than it has hitherto received. The following essay is designed, therefore, to supply an obvious want. Its results are given in some detail up to the date of publication. Part I. presents in a popular form the leading historical facts as to the discovery of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and Astræa; a tabular statement of the dates and places of discovery for the entire group; a list of the names of discoverers, with the number of minor planets detected by each; and a table of the principal elements so far as computed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book develops a general approach that can be systematically refined to investigate the statics and dynamics of deformable solid bodies. These methods are then employed to small bodies in the Solar System. With several space missions underway and more being planned, interest in our immediate neighbourhood is growing. In this spirit, this book investigates various phenomena encountered in planetary science, including disruptions during planetary fly-bys, equilibrium shapes and stability of small rubble bodies, and spin-driven shape changes. The flexible procedure proposed here will help readers gain valuable insights into the mechanics of solar system bodies, while at the same time complementing numerical investigations. The technique itself is built upon the virial method successfully employed by Chandrasekhar (1969) to study the equilibrium shapes of spinning fluid objects. However, here Chandrasekhar’s approach is modified in order to study more complex dynamical situations and include objects of different rheologies, e.g., granular aggregates, or “rubble piles”. The book is largely self-contained, though some basic familiarity with continuum mechanics will be beneficial.