Kepler strikes again! A couple of weeks ago, in a two–part essay, I wrote about a 1608 book by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler that scholars consider the first work of science fiction: Somnium—Latin for The Dream. This past week, I got to thinking about Kepler’s book again, after the discovery of dwarf planet 2012 VP113 (which the discoverers have nicknamed VP, as well as Biden, because of all the stars in the background of his official portrait) (or maybe not), an object that redefines the edge of the solar system.
In Kepler’s book, a narrator recounts a dream in which he reads a book about a boy who hears a story from an alien who often travels to the Moon. Kepler had good reason to keep his distance, authorially speaking. To imagine the universe from a perspective other than Earth’s was a radical notion—so radical that The Dream wasn’t published until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death.
I don’t think the discovery of a dwarf planet—or the idea of there even being such a thing as a dwarf planet—would have surprised Kepler. In The Dream, he’s open to exotic possibilities. The alien describes enormous creatures with spongy skin that turns brittle in the sun. Instead, I think if you told Kepler that a planet-like object would be discovered at the edge of the solar system, his response would have been pleasure at the use of the term “solar system”: The system really is solar, as in, you know, revolving around the Sun? (Okay, the “you know” might be anachronistic.)
Kepler had collaborated with Tycho Brahe, the astronomer who’d recently had access to the most precise instruments in history. After Brahe’s death in 1601 Kepler basically inherited Brahe’s records. Kepler uses this data in The Dream to show the differences between Earth’s astronomy and the way the universe would look from the Moon. The locations of the constellations would be different. The positions and distances of the planets. The lengths of the seasons. The rising and setting of the Sun. Solar eclipses, which would occur when the view of the Sun is blocked not by the moon, but by
.
When Kepler wrote The Dream, the cosmos consisted of the same objects that it always had—the ones that were visible with the naked eye. The stars, the Sun, the Moon, five planets, and Earth. Two years later, Galileo added to that census, when he pointed a primitive telescope at Jupiter and detected four moons.
But in a way, Kepler had beat him to it. By imagining the universe from the point of view of someone on the Moon, he’d discovered a new planet: Earth.
The name “Biden” comes from the designation, 2012VP113, as in VP, as in Vice President. But you knew that, right?
Yes. Maybe I should have made the reference in paragraph two more explicit. Oh, well.