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Updated: July 23, 2025
The existence of the supernumerary was a puzzle, but Olbers solved it for the moment by suggesting that Ceres and Pallas, as he called his captive, might be fragments of a quondam planet, shattered by internal explosion or by the impact of a comet. Other similar fragments, he ventured to predict, would be found when searched for.
Nevertheless the hypothesis of Olbers has not held its ground. It seemed as if all the evidence available for its support had been produced at once and spontaneously, while the unfavourable items were elicited slowly, and, as it were, by cross-examination.
After Piazzi, Olbers, and Harding had discovered the small planets, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, he applied himself to the measurement of their angular diameters. His researches led him to the conclusion that these four new bodies could not properly be ranked with the planets, and he proposed to call them Asteroids a name now generally adopted.
But before it closed, its cultivation had received a powerful stimulus through the invention of an improved method. The name of Olbers has already been brought prominently before our readers in connection with asteroidal discoveries; these, however, were but chance excursions from the path of cometary research which he steadily pursued through life.
So keen was his penetration into the interior of political events, and the secret policy under which they moved, that he talked rather with the authority of a diplomatic person who had access to cabinet intelligence, than as a simple spectator of the great scenes which were unfolding in Europe. Herschel. Olbers, at Bremen.
The principal ray-systems are those of Tycho, Copernicus, Kepler, Anaxagoras, Aristarchus, Olbers, Byrgius A, and Zuchius; while Autolycus, Aristillus, Proclus, Timocharis, Furnerius A, and Menelaus are grouped as constituting minor systems. Many additional centres exist, a list of which will be found in the appendix. The rays emanating from Tycho surpass in extent and interest any of the others.
Piazzi died in 1826, Harding in 1834, Olbers in 1840; all those who had prepared or participated in the first discoveries passed away without witnessing their resumption. In 1830, however, a certain Hencke, ex-postmaster in the Prussian town of Driessen, set himself to watch for new planets, and after fifteen long years his patience was rewarded.
Cometary trains are then, as Olbers rightly conceived them to be, emanations, not appendages inconceivably rapid outflows of highly rarefied matter, the greater part, if not all, of which becomes permanently detached from the nucleus. That of the comet of 1843 reached, about the time that it became visible in this country, the extravagant length of 200 millions of miles.
Olbers named the second asteroid Pallas; the third was called Juno whose rank in the Greek and Roman pantheon might have suggested one of the major planets as her representative in the skies; and the fourth was called Vesta, from the Roman divinity of the hearthstone. Here then there was a pause.
But even these doubters were silenced when the great shower of shooting-stars appeared again in 1866, as predicted by Olbers and Newton, radiating from the same point of the heavens as before.
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