ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Of Comets, Planets, and the Formation of a Collaborative Consciousness

• In Event: New Perspectives on Collaboration in Science 1

English Abstract

In the 18th century, the observation of comets and the determination of their orbits emerged as a highly cooperative enterprise. Astronomers—aware that multiple observations from separated locations on the Earth’s surface were essential to narrowing down the range of feasible orbits—exchanged data and calculation methods to recover a comet as soon as it reappeared after passing behind the Sun. This collaborative framework proved crucial not only for correctly recognizing Uranus—first identified by William Herschel as a comet in 1781, then acknowledged as a planet the following year—but also in the search for an intermediate planet between Mars and Jupiter, which culminated in the identification of Ceres in 1801, today known as the largest asteroid or, more precisely, a dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt.
Drawing particularly on the metaphor of a Himmelspolizey, or “celestial police”, advanced by astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach after the first Astronomers’ Congress in Gotha (1798) to promote the “systematic search for the hypothesized planet between Mars and Jupiter”, this paper explores how, and to what extent, the emergence of a collaborative consciousness among astronomers in the late eighteenth century was shaped by these epistemic demands and by their integration into the existing institutional landscape of observatories and observatory networks.

Author

• Luca Guzzardi, University of Milan