THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
70 Falmouth Street      Portland, Maine 04103
(207) 780-4249      usm.maine.edu/planet
43.6667° N    70.2667° W  Altitude:  10 feet below sea level Founded
January 1970
2021-2022: XCIX
                           “In space there are countless constellations,
suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets
remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless
earths circling around their suns...”    -Giordano Bruno


THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
5000 Vindications for Giordano

By vocation, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a Dominican Friar.  By
avocation, he was also a mathematician, philosopher, poet, Hermetic
occultist and cosmological theorist.   Mind you, a cosmological theorist
long before the true advent of cosmology.    Even during the latter years
of Bruno's extraordinary life, most people would have believed that this
metaphysically-minded monk was laying his footfalls onto an immobile Earth:
an Earth about which a minuscule cosmos turned.   The heliocentric model
proposed by Copernicus -who died five years prior to Giordano's birth-
remained unknown to most and unaccepted by most of those who knew of it.
 Principal among the model's detractors was the same Catholic church to
which Bruno had devoted his life.

This hostility was problematic to the friar whose irrepressible spirit and
expansive mind impelled him to mentally elevate himself above the static
world and out into a cosmos of infinite richness.  As he, himself, wrote

"I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. And while I rise from my
own globe to others and penetrate ever further through the eternal field.
That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me."

Not only did he subscribe to the Copernican notion of an Earth moving
around the Sun, he also conceived that the heavens contained innumerable
such systems of planets revolving around their own parent stars.    His was
a fertile Universe governed by a beneficent God capable of and inclined
toward prodigious creation.  In Bruno's mind, Copernicus' heliocentrism
served as the keyhole through which all could behold boundless
magnificence.

Tragically, Bruno lived and dreamed during a time when espousing views that
were at variance with the prevailing sentiment proved quite dangerous.
And, on February 17, 1600, Bruno was burned to the stake.   Just prior to
his execution, he was reported to have said

“I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come
when all will see what I see.”

On the first full day of spring 2022,  NASA confirmed the detection of 65
more exoplanets, bringing the total of known worlds up to 5,045.     This
milestone was reached exactly thirty years after Aleksander Wolszczan and
Dale Frail discovered the first known exoplanet: one discovered around the
pulsar PSR B1257+12.

Pulsar planets, Earth-like planets, Hot Jupiters, Super-Puff planets.
Planets harboring vast oceans of molten rock; planets where iron falls as
rain.   Astronomers have discovered worlds far more exotic than most of us
could have even imagined.      These 5000 planets are most assuredly just a
minuscule sample of the billions, if not trillions of worlds spinning in
the vast expanses of the Milky Way.   Astronomers even believe that
renegade planets, those not attached to any star, are careening through the
gulfs of interstellar space by the millions.  Even Bruno - as far as we
know- didn't entertain the possibility of such rogue planets.  Hence, the
Universe has shown itself to be even more creative than the far-seeing
Bruno imagined.

Today, we're all seeing in reality what Bruno envisaged in his mind.
 Perhaps he would have taken comfort from the knowledge that the flames
which ended his life were unable to extinguish his ideas.

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