Fig. 90.—Planetary orbits to scale; showing the Asteroidal region between Jupiter and Mars. (The orbits of satellites are exaggerated.)
In 1800 the preliminaries were settled: the heavens near the zodiac were divided into twenty-four regions, each of which was intrusted to one observer to be swept. Meanwhile, however, quite independently of these arrangements in Germany, and entirely unknown to this committee, a quiet astronomer in Sicily, Piazzi, was engaged in making a catalogue of the stars. His attention was directed to a certain region in Taurus by an error in a previous catalogue, which contained a star really non-existent.
In the course of his scrutiny, on the 1st of January, 1801, he noticed a small star which next evening appeared to have shifted. He watched it anxiously for successive evenings, and by the 24th of January he was quite sure he had got hold of some moving body, not a star: probably, he thought, a comet. It was very small, only of the eighth magnitude; and he wrote to two astronomers (one of them Bode himself) saying what he had observed. He continued to observe till the 11th of February, when he was attacked by illness and compelled to cease.
His letters did not reach their destination till the end of March. Directly Bode opened his letter he jumped to the conclusion that this must be the missing planet. But unfortunately he was unable to verify the guess, for the object, whatever it was, had now got too near the sun to be seen. It would not be likely to be out again before September, and by that time it would be hopelessly lost again, and have just as much to be rediscovered as if it had never been seen.
Mathematical astronomers tried to calculate a possible orbit for the body from the observations of Piazzi, but the observed places were so desperately few and close together. It was like having to determine a curve from three points close together. Three observations ought to serve,[27] but if they are taken with insufficient interval between them it is extremely difficult to construct the whole circumstances of the orbit from them. All the calculations gave different results, and none were of the slightest use.
The difficulty as it turned out was most fortunate. It resulted in the discovery of one of the greatest mathematicians, perhaps the greatest, that Germany has ever produced—Gauss. He was then a young man of twenty-five, eking out a living by tuition. He had invented but not published several powerful mathematical methods (one of them now known as "the method of least squares"), and he applied them to Piazzi's observations. He was thus able to calculate an orbit, and to predict a place where, by the end of the year, the planet should be visible. On the 31st of December of that same year, very near the place predicted by Gauss, von Zach rediscovered it, and Olbers discovered it also the next evening. Piazzi called it Ceres, after the tutelary goddess of Sicily.