THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM

70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103

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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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