Hipparchus Solar and lunar theoryGreek astronomer also spelled Hipparchos

born , Nicaea, Bithynia [now Iznik, Turkey] died after 127 bc , Rhodes?

Hipparchus’s most important astronomical work concerned the orbits of the Sun and Moon, a determination of their sizes and distances from the Earth, and the study of eclipses. Like most of his predecessors—Aristarchus of Samos was an exception—Hipparchus assumed a spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe (the geocentric cosmology). From this perspective, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (all of the solar system bodies visible to the naked eye), as well as the stars (whose realm was known as the celestial sphere), revolved around the Earth each day.

Every year the Sun traces out a circular path in a west-to-east direction relative to the stars (this is in addition to the apparent daily east-to-west rotation of the celestial sphere around the Earth). Hipparchus had good reasons for believing that the Sun’s path, known as the ecliptic, is a great circle, i.e., that the plane of the ecliptic passes through the Earth’s centre. The two points at which the ecliptic and the equatorial plane intersect, known as the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the two points of the ecliptic farthest north and south from the equatorial plane, known as the summer and winter solstices, divide the ecliptic into four equal parts. However, the Sun’s passage through each section of the ecliptic, or season, is not symmetrical. Hipparchus attempted to explain how the Sun could travel with uniform speed along a regular circular path and yet produce seasons of unequal length.

Hipparchus knew of two possible explanations for the Sun’s apparent motion, the eccenter and the epicyclic models (see Ptolemaic system). These models, which assumed that the apparent irregular motion was produced by compounding two or more uniform circular motions, were probably familiar to Greek astronomers well before Hipparchus. His contribution was to discover a method of using the observed dates of two equinoxes and a solstice to calculate the size and direction of the displacement of the Sun’s orbit. With Hipparchus’s mathematical model one could calculate not only the Sun’s orbital location on any date, but also its position as seen from the Earth. The history of celestial mechanics until Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was mostly an elaboration of Hipparchus’s model.

Hipparchus also tried to measure as precisely as possible the length of the tropical year—the period for the Sun to complete one passage through the ecliptic. He made observations of consecutive equinoxes and solstices, but the results were inconclusive: he could not distinguish between possible observational errors and variations in the tropical year. However, by comparing his own observations of solstices with observations made in the 5th and 3rd centuries bc, Hipparchus succeeded in obtaining an estimate of the tropical year that was only 6 minutes too long.

He was then in a position to calculate equinox and solstice dates for any year. Applying this information to recorded observations from about 150 years before his time, Hipparchus made the unexpected discovery that certain stars near the ecliptic had moved about 2° relative to the equinoxes. He contemplated various explanations—for example, that these stars were actually very slowly moving planets—before he settled on the essentially correct theory that all the stars made a gradual eastward revolution relative to the equinoxes. Since Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) established his heliocentric model of the universe, the stars have provided a fixed frame of reference, relative to which the plane of the equator slowly shifts—a phenomenon referred to as the precession of the equinoxes. (See animation.)

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Hipparchus also analyzed the more complicated motion of the Moon in order to construct a theory of eclipses. In addition to varying in apparent speed, the Moon diverges north and south of the ecliptic, and the periodicities of these phenomena are different. Hipparchus adopted values for the Moon’s periodicities that were known to contemporary Babylonian astronomers, and he confirmed their accuracy by comparing recorded observations of lunar eclipses separated by intervals of several centuries. It remained, however, for Ptolemy (ad 127–145) to finish fashioning a fully predictive lunar model.

In On Sizes and Distances (now lost), Hipparchus reportedly measured the Moon’s orbit in relation to the size of the Earth. He had two methods of doing this. One method used an observation of a solar eclipse that had been total near the Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles) but only partial at Alexandria. Hipparchus assumed that the difference could be attributed entirely to the Moon’s observable parallax against the stars, which amounts to supposing that the Sun, like the stars, is indefinitely far away. (Parallax is the apparent displacement of an object when viewed from different vantage points). Hipparchus thus calculated that the mean distance of the Moon from the Earth is 77 times the Earth’s radius. In the second method he hypothesized that the distance from the centre of the Earth to the Sun is 490 times the Earth’s radius—perhaps chosen because that is the shortest distance consistent with a parallax that is too small for detection by the unaided eye. Using the visually identical sizes of the solar and lunar discs, and observations of the Earth’s shadow during lunar eclipses, Hipparchus found a relationship between the lunar and solar distances that enabled him to calculate that the Moon’s mean distance from the Earth is approximately 63 times the Earth’s radius. (The true value is about 60 times.)