Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/202

152 the moons or satellites of Jupiter. On January 7th, 1610, Galilei turned his telescope on to Jupiter, and noticed three faint stars which caught his attention on account of their closeness to the planet and their arrangement nearly in a straight line with it. He looked again next night, and noticed that they had changed their positions relatively to Jupiter, but that the change did not seem to be such as could result from Jupiter's own motion, if the new bodies were fixed stars. Two nights later he was able to confirm this conclusion, and to infer that the new bodies were not fixed stars, but moving bodies which accompanied Jupiter in his movements. A fourth body was noticed on January 13th, and the motions of all four were soon recognised by Galilei as being motions of revolution round Jupiter as a centre. With characteristic thoroughness he

watched the motions of the new bodies night after night, and by the date of the publication of his book had already estimated with very fair accuracy their periods of revolution round Jupiter, which ranged between about 42 hours and 17 days; and he continued to watch their motions for years.

The new bodies were at first called by their discoverer Medicean planets, in honour of his patron Cosmo de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany; but it was evident that bodies revolving round a planet, as the planets themselves revolved round the sun, formed a new class of bodies distinct from the known planets, and the name of satellite, suggested by Kepler as applicable to the new bodies as well as to the moon, has been generally accepted.

The discovery of Jupiter's satellites shewed the falsity of the old doctrine that the earth was the only centre of motion; it tended, moreover, seriously to discredit the infallibility of Aristotle and Ptolemy, who had clearly no knowledge of the existence of such bodies; and again those who had difficulty in believing that Venus and