Expert Voices

How We Learned to Predict Solar Eclipses

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights

Ancient astronomers had a really tough time predicting solar eclipses, sometimes with dire results. For a particularly gruesome example, we have a story passed down to us of Hi and Ho, the court astrologers (which for a long time, were indistinguishable from astronomers) of the emperor K'ang of ancient China. Apparently they were out drinking one night and somehow neglected to predict the eclipse of 2159 B.C. The emperor was not pleased. They were beheaded. End of story. 

Hi and Ho were not exactly fully to blame. Solar eclipses were notoriously hard to predict. While they occur roughly every couple of years somewhere on the Earth, for any region the size of a country you had to rely on complex and intricate cycles within cycles within cycles to even come close to finding a rhythm. That is, until the ultimate Power Couple of gravity came onto the scene.

Related: Best Photos of the 2019 Total Solar Eclipse

What a downer

Everyone who was anyone had known about gravity for a long time. It's the thing that makes objects fall to the Earth. But Isaac Newton figured out something absolutely remarkable about gravity that no one else had ever realized: that it's universal.

According to Isaac himself, the thought struck him when he watched an apple fall from a tree as he was chilling at his mom's house one lazy afternoon. He saw the apple fall in a straight line toward the Earth. We've all seen this exact same thing, but in that moment Newton saw something stunning. He saw the apple accelerate from being still to moving. And all accelerations require a force. So, the Earth was applying a force to the apple even though it wasn't touching it.

So far, so good, and so far, partially mundane. But old Isaac also knew that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If the Earth is applying a force to accelerate the apple, then the apple must be applying a force to accelerate the Earth. Whatever this force of gravity is, it must be mutual and in both directions. The reason the apple moves more than the Earth is because the mass of the Earth is so much greater — it just appears like that apple is doing all the moving and the Earth is doing all the work, when in Newton's suddenly much clearer vision, all things were equal when it comes to forces.

So, if the Earth is applying gravity to the apple and the apple is applying gravity to the Earth, then this force of gravity must be operating with all pairs of objects simultaneously all across the universe. In other words, gravity must be universal.

Best gravitational buds

Newton worked out the implications of this newfound universal force of gravity, and instantly many things clicked into place. He was able to predict the speed of the moon in its orbit. He was able to rederive Kepler's laws from much simpler principles. And he was able to explain the motions of all the planets and all the moons around those planets. And then he took all this fantastic work, wrote it in a book, and put the book on a shelf and forgot about it

It sat there for years until one of his friends, Edmond Halley, started agitating for him to publish it. Apparently, for Newton, unlocking the secrets of universal gravity was just an idle afternoon pastime and not something worthy of serious academic interest. But Halley knew better. He constantly pressed (and probably annoyed) Newton until he finally published his work.

Edmond Halley then took this newfangled theory of universal gravitation and went crazy with it, solving almost every single problem known to plague astronomers. Most notably, he figured out the regular pattern of a particular comet that now bears his name by digging into the historical records and using that data to feed into calculations of a prediction of its reappearance.

But perhaps even more importantly, by digging into the ancient records, Halley was able to predict an upcoming total solar eclipse over his home city of London. Using Newton's theory of universal gravitation, Halley predicted the eclipse of May 3, 1715, to an accuracy of a scant four minutes.

That's right. Four minutes. Without any calculator or computer. Just using historical records and Newton's laws, Halley nailed the first-ever accurate prediction of a solar eclipse, something that had bedeviled astronomers ever since the unfortunate days of Hi and Ho thousands of years ago. It's a shame those guys didn't have a buddy like Newton.

Learn more by listening to the episode "What can we learn from solar eclipses?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Michael M., Crai W., and Robert M. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter. 

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Paul Sutter
Space.com Contributor

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an "Agent to the Stars," Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular "Ask a Spaceman!" podcast, author of "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space" and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.

  • beginningastronomy.net
    Great stuff, really interesting
    Reply
  • rod
    Very enjoyable and the story of Hi and Ho - very bad outcome for these ancient astronomers :) Assyrian and Babylonian astronomers worked hard to predict solar eclipses and lunar eclipses and we have records from this time too as well as solar and lunar eclipses recorded in the work of Claudius Ptolemy. Josephus writings record a lunar eclipse near the time of Herod's death - important in the chronology of dating the time of Jesus Christ birth and narratives. It was difficult in the ancient world but today, the modern, heliocentric solar system with elliptical orbit of the Moon and knowledge of gravity, makes it much better and much more accurate to predict, like the 21-Augus-2017 total solar eclipse across the USA. If I recall correctly, it was the son of Charles Darwin, George Darwin who observed and measured solar eclipses in the 1880s using the telescopes of that period, understood the Moon is slowly receding from Earth orbit. That lead to the hypothesis of the rapidly spinning Earth with fission of the Moon from Earth, then its slow recession from Earth to present orbit. Others today research Assyrian and Babylonian solar eclipse records preserved in archaeology, efforts to reconstruct the Earth's past rotation and slow changes compared to the present, as well as slow expansion of the Moon's orbit.
    Reply