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Updated: June 23, 2025
We have already remarked that one of the larger asteroids, and the one which appears to the eye as the most brilliant of all, Vesta, has been suspected of variability, but not so extensive as that of Eros. Olbers, at the beginning of the last century, was of the opinion that Vesta's variations were due to its being not a globe but an angular mass.
If, as Olbers supposed, they resulted from the bursting of a planet once revolving in the region they occupy, the implications are: first, that the fragments must be most abundant in the space immediately about the original orbit, and less abundant far away from it; second, that the large fragments must be relatively few, while of smaller fragments the numbers will increase as the sizes decrease; third, that as some among the smaller fragments will be propelled further than any of the larger, the widest deviations in mean distance from the mean distance of the original planet, will be presented by the smallest members of the assemblage; and fourth, that the orbits differing most from the rest in eccentricity and in inclination, will be among those of these smallest members.
It has a large crater on its W. wall, a smaller one on the E., and a third on the N. The floor includes a central mountain, and, according to Schmidt, four craters. He also shows a crater-rill on the W. wall, N. of the large crater thereon. Olbers is the origin of a fine system of light rays.
The latter case has been that which is the most common, but nevertheless the solar system affords us an instance of the first case in the four small planets which move between Jupiter and Mars; at least, if we do not suppose, as does M. Olbers, that they originally formed a single planet which a mighty explosion broke up into several portions each moving at different velocities.
The intimation that fresh discoveries might be expected in those particular regions was singularly justified by the detection of two bodies now known respectively as Juno and Vesta. The first was found near the predicted spot in Cetus by Harding, Schröter's assistant at Lilienthal, September 2, 1804; the second by Olbers himself in Virgo, after three years of persistent scrutiny, March 29, 1807.
The love of science, however, prevailed; he chose poverty and the stars, and went to Lilienthal with a salary of a hundred thalers yearly. Looking back over his life's work, Olbers long afterwards declared that the greatest service which he had rendered to astronomy was that of having discerned, directed, and promoted the genius of Bessel. For four years he continued in Schröter's employment.
Nor did he hesitate to recur to the analogy of magnetic polarity, or to declare, still more emphatically than Olbers, "the emission of the tail to be a purely electrical phenomenon." The transformations undergone by this body were almost as strange and complete as those which affected the brigands in Dante's Inferno.
He published two memoirs relative to Mars, the one in 1781, the other in 1784, and the discovery of its being flattened at the poles we owe to him. After the discovery of the small planets, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, by Piazzi, Olbers, and Harding, Herschel applied himself to measuring their angular diameter.
He further attempted to show that the limits of this vast assemblage must remain for ever shrouded from human discernment, owing to the gradual extinction of light in its passage through space, and sought to confer upon this celebrated hypothesis a definiteness and certainty far beyond the aspirations of its earlier advocates, Chéseaux and Olbers; but arbitrary assumptions vitiated his reasonings on this, as well as on some other points.
The paper was immediately sent to Von Zach for publication, with a note from Olbers explaining the circumstances of its author; and the name of Bessel became the common property of learned Europe. He had, however, as yet no intention of adopting astronomy as his profession.
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