Vulcan was declared in 1860, but in 1846, astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier sat down and attempted to locate a planet that humans had never seen before, named Vulcan.
Although its existence was doubted, everything indicated that it was there. And that ‘everything’ was the calculations of eminent scientists who knew perfectly what Isaac Newton had left behind and the laws that had governed it since 1687.
The law of universal gravitation had explained the celestial movement of the stars without a doubt for two centuries and, according to that theoretical framework, the only thing that could explain the orbit of Mercury, one of the most disconcerting phenomena in the Solar System, was the existence of a hitherto unseen planet.
Identifying a new planet, Vulcan
Although there was a small difference between the observed orbit of Uranus, Le Verrier proposed that the difference could be explained by another planet beyond Uranus and made predictions about the orbit of this previously unknown body.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, new moons were discovered around Jupiter and Saturn, numerous galaxies and nebulae, and even a new planet Uranus. In the middle of these centuries, irregularities were observed in the orbit of Uranus that could only be explained with the presence of a new planet similar in size to Uranus itself, but located beyond it.
A few years later, Neptune was discovered thanks to mathematical predictions. This was seen as a resounding success of Newton’s universal gravitation. Neptune was discovered in 1846, thanks to the predictions of Urbain Le Verrier, so it is not surprising that upon observing irregularities in the orbit of Mercury in 1859 he proposed the existence of a new planet between the latter and the Sun.
To solve the mystery, Le Verrier had followed the same method, with the same meticulous attention to detail, after calculating the influence of the gravitational attraction of Venus, the Earth, Mars and Jupiter, his predictions of Mercury’s orbit were always slightly off. wrong.
Mercury was simply never where it was supposed to be according to all the knowledge of the time. The solution to the enigma had to be, as in the case of Uranus, the presence of Vulcan, although he was not sure.
Months later, an amateur astronomy doctor named Edmond Modeste Lescarbault had observed a black dot passing in front of the Sun with his telescope, had taken note of the size, speed and duration of the transit and after reading about Le Verrier’s hypothetical planet , sent him a letter with all the details.
The renowned astronomer came to visit him, reviewed the doctor’s equipment and notes, and excitedly announced the discovery of Vulcan in the early 1860s.
Vulcan is expelled
The real or imaginary existence of Vulcan came to an end in the Prussian Academy of Sciences when Albert Einstein disrupted the vision of the Universe with his Theory of General Relativity, as he discovered anomalies in the orbit of Mercury.
As a result, apparently these were not due to the presence of an unknown planet, but to the fact that Newton’s Gravitation was not entirely accurate. Once the corrections given by the new theory of , the problem was resolved and the advance of Mercury’s perihelion explained.
As such, Einstein’s theory could explain both the orbit of Mercury and the orbit of Earth, Mars, Jupiter, etc. without resorting to additional planets, therefore the planet Vulcan no longer existed.
What does Einstein’s theory say? General Relativity says that space and time are not static, but dynamic and can change, and what Einstein argued to explain the peculiarity of Mercury’s orbit was that a massive object, in this case the Sun, was capable of bending space and time and alter the path of light, so that a ray that passes near the Sun travels a curved path.