How did we come to have an image of The Solar System? Think of all the ways you have seen the solar system depicted — all the diagrams in books that show to scale the sizes of the orbits of its planets, and that show to scale the sizes of the planets themselves. Then think of all the scale models you have seen that try to convey the sizes and distances within the solar system. Who first thought to make those sorts of diagrams and models?
There was a model solar system at the small observatory my college operated for a while in Otter Creek Park, located between Brandenburg and Muldraugh, Kentucky. The park naturalist and I built the model. The Sun was a circle the size of an orange on a metal plate on the observatory door. Mercury through Mars were all within a few yards/meters of the observatory door… but you had to start walking to see Jupiter and Saturn, and really walk to get to Uranus and finally Neptune. Most of the planets were just very small divots drilled in metal plates — Jupiter was represented by a divot roughly a centimeter in diameter.
There are larger and more elaborate models of the solar system that have become popular extravaganzas, abiding at the intersection of science, education, public art, and tourism. One of the better-known examples is that at the Rose Center for Earth and Space of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Some models take things to extremes. There is “The Main Solar System Model” (click here), a 40-mile (64 kilometer) long model from the sun to Pluto installed in Aroostook County, Northern Maine in 2003. There is the “World’s Biggest Solar System Model” (click here) in Sweden; it uses the building known as the “Globen” in Stockholm as the sun, and goes as far as 590 miles (950 kilometers) from that origin point to include a marker for the transition between the solar wind and the surrounding galactic gas. There is the Peoria Riverfront Museum’s Central Illinois Community Solar System (click here), which covers the entire solar system, includes comet markers, and — going beyond the solar system to the stars — takes the Alpha Centauri system (the closest star system to the sun) to be represented by a moon crater in the Apollo 11 landing site.
There has not been much study of how people first began thinking of the solar system as a thing you could model, or map. Pedro Raposo and I have a new paper, published this fall in the Journal for Astronomical History and Heritage (JAHH), that investigates this matter. Its title is “‘A True and Exact Description of the sun’s Palace’: Constructing the Image of the Solar System”. It was the cover paper for this issue of JAHH. Raposo is the Martha Hamilton and I. Wistar Morris III Executive Director, Library and Archives, at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We began working on this subject back in 2019, for a history of astronomy workshop hosted by the University of Notre Dame and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago (Pedro was with the Adler at the time).
Our paper addresses the emergence and early development of solar system maps and diagrams, focusing on images produced by Andreas Cellarius, Christiaan Huygens (especially), William Whiston, and James Ferguson between the mid-seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. These maps and diagrams made the solar system into a mappable object, something drawn to scale, like landscapes on Earth. We find that these maps and diagrams were originally not simply educational representations of the solar system. They were originally produced with the aim of promoting certain ideas — ideas about Copernicanism, about whether there were other inhabited worlds like Earth, about Newtonian physics, and even about God. No, it is not a faith and science paper, but you will find God mentioned many times, because the people we discuss talk about God a good bit.
Pretty much everyone has seen a depiction of the solar system at some point, so I think the paper will be of interest to many. It is also open-access! However, it is an in-depth paper with lots of illustrations. It will keep you occupied for a while.
CLICK HERE to access the paper from JAHH directly.
