Wacky and Wonderful Misconceptions About Our Universe by Geoffrey Kirby

Author:Geoffrey Kirby
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

There’s More Than One Moon Up There!

There is no reason why there should not be more moons in orbit around Earth than just the one that shines down upon us. The French astronomer Frédéric Petit, who was director of the prestigious Toulouse Observatory in France in the middle of the 19th century, startled the astronomical world by announcing in 1846 that he had discovered a second moon traveling around Earth. Petit claimed to have calculated that this second moon had an elliptical orbit that bought it hurtling past Earth within 37,000 feet of Earth’s surface. This is typical of the cruising altitude of modern passenger aircraft and is within Earth’s atmosphere. Had this moon really existed it would have provided air travelers with spectacular in-flight entertainment as it shot past. Who needs to go to the Moon when there is one flying so close above our heads? These observations and analyses were dismissed as ludicrous by fellow astronomers, and Petit’s moon was never seen other than by Petit himself. Petit’s proposed moon was mentioned in Jules Verne ‘s 1870 novel Around the Moon.

In 1898, Hamburg scientist Dr. Georg Waltemath wrote in a learned science journal that he had discovered a cloud of tiny moons orbiting Earth [32]. Waltemath described one of the proposed moons as being 620,000 miles from Earth, with a diameter of 400 miles and a 119-day orbital period. He bizarrely claimed that the new moon was invisible at some times and as bright as the Sun at other times. He made predictions for its next appearances. In 1898 Waltemath announced to a skeptical world the discovery of a third moon that he termed a “Wahrhafter Wetter und Magnet Mond” (“Real Weather and Magnet Moon”). Waltemath claimed he had measured it as about 450 miles in diameter and that it was much closer than the other moons that he claimed to have discovered previously.

A Canadian weather expert named E. Stone Wiggins claimed in 1907 that the exceptionally cold spring had been due to the effect of an undiscovered moon. He actually claimed to have seen this moon in 1882. He then claimed that it was the cause of an unpredicted solar eclipse in May 1882, although nobody other than Wiggins appears to have observed this wonderful sight. He furthermore claimed that it was identical to a sighting of a green crescent moon seen in New Zealand. Such a green moon was also claimed to have been seen in 1886 in North America. However, these green moons were only visible for periods of less than thirty minutes before they vanished.

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